Daily Inspiration: “The funny thing about your mistakes is that they are actually a foundation for your achievements!”

“The funny thing about your mistakes is that they are actually a foundation for your achievements!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Successful failure.

It seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it!

But it’s not.

If you play it right, that one worst moment in your life might actually become the basis for the best moments that are yet to come! That’s because the things that you have done wrong are actually somehow teaching you how to do things right once you try again. That’s why getting back up on your feet after falling flat on your face is so critically important – it’s an opportunity for you to learn from your mistakes and perhaps do something right after all!

But you can’t always count on a quick recovery – you must be willing to put in the work. It might happen that you fail yet again and need to give it another go the next time around. It’s often said that a successful life is really a series of sequential failures, layered on top of one another to form a solid foundation for progress, victory, and achievement.

Yet failure is, by itself, a horrid and awful experience. The very nature of that moment of failure or the time after – the feelings of fear, shock, shame, regret, anger – might cloud your ability to see the fact that you’ve done something good. Here’s a reality – It’s often said that successful people fail early, fail often, and fail fast. They’ve come to learn that their success comes from a series of successful failures!

I was reminded of this reality last night shortly after working on this quote when I watched the Steve Jobs biopic. It’s a fascinating movie, featuring moments from his life in the hours leading up to a series of product launches – the Apple Macintosh, the NeXT computer, and the iMac. The first two, although groundbreaking in design, scope, architecture, and software, were considered failures. Yet both led to the massive success of the iMac, which led to the rebirth of todays’ Apple Computer.

Successful failure. That’s what defined Steve Jobs, and it’s what can define you if you are currently in the midst of the awfulness of failure.

Because failure is, actually, success.