Do you see career failures as learning opportunities?

21 February 2014 04:54 am - 0 - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

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Too many of us look at career failures for the face value –as failures. Yet, life’s lessons are anything to go by; failures are not setbacks but foot-steps towards greater success and bigger achievement.

Dark days and good ones
They say the finest steel gets put through the toughest furnace. Unless and until you go through failures of your own, you will never reach the kind of maturity it takes to develop resilience, growth and the will to do better. The lessons learnt in failures at work are invaluable – as those who have experienced such setbacks will share.
The world is full of successful men and women whose first endeavours were classified as failures. Steve Jobs was one of them. There are many others who today share their hall of fame with big time failures that ultimately set the path for greater success.

When you are on the career ladder, whether working for yourself or for a company, not every effort is going to be a success. There will be the dark days and the good ones too. But what lessons can we take objectively from the failures and can those failures prop us towards the ultimate success stories we all want to write?
There are many advantages of going through failures too – if you have not been exposed to failure of some sort, then maybe your career is not challenging enough. The best swimmers learn in the deep end – you may struggle and panic but in the end, you pick up the skills and learn so much from being out there, on the kind of turf that teaches you some of life’s finest lessons.

Failures to success stories
Not everyone is cut out for challenges and of course failures. Too often, someone may give up on a dream because all that individual experienced were failures. Perseverance is a great asset to have on your career ladder – if you persevere enough and are able to navigate your way through the tough times, the rainbow will be there at the end.

The world is full of failures stories that turned out to be famous success stories too. Take the case of Henry Ford, who failed five times before his automobile company finally took off. R.H. Macy, who founded the prestigious Macy’s chain of stores, failed seven times before his store in the New York City started to do well.

Honda’s founder started off with what we may today call an epic failure – Toyota turned him down for a job at which point he started making scooters at home. The rest of the story is history. Sony’s founder Akio Morita had a failure in the first rice cooker he created but he persisted and today Sony is a legend in the world of business.
It is always good to ask ourselves when things go wrong what the lesson involved is. There is always an invaluable lesson behind every failure; something didn’t work right and there’s no better learning opportunity than failures to learn from. What matters most is our attitude towards failure than anything else. Often enough, if we have the right attitude and the right spirit to take failure in, then we have achieved the major portion of taking the best out of the lesson.

Failure not an option
“Failure is not an option” the famous words were uttered by NASA flight controller Jerry C. Bostick during the mission to bring the damaged Apollo 13 back to the Earth – somehow, the memory of that is strong and alive in the corporate world and almost everyone seems to be shy of failing. Too often, society or the corporate world does not reward or encourage failures, which are costly and damaging but inevitably, for every success, there will be a failure.

It seems that some of today’s best run companies are embracing the prospects of lessons learnt in failures. Business Week recently reported that many companies were actively seeking individuals whose track record reflect both success and failure – on the assumption that those who have fought battles and succeeded in staying alive in the trenches, have a better chance of running more flexible and dynamic corporate entities at the end of the day.

The companies viewed them as veterans who thrive when challenged and who can rise to the occasion with the necessary set of skills instead of balking. These companies seem to believe that great feats also involve great risks and they could be right.

So, every time a failure tries you trip you over, go back to the drawing board. Is this an opportunity and what can I learn from it? It was the inventor of the light bulb we all know, Thomas Edison, who uttered the famous words: “I have not failed – I have just found 10,000 ways that did not work.”

(Nayomini Weerasooriya, a writer, senior journalist and a PR professional, can be contacted at nayominiweerasooriya@gmail.com)

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