Never Fail Again: 

 How to Find Success No Matter What Happens

We all have occasions when things don’t go well.  But is it possible to never fail at anything?  That depends on how you look at it.

Is ‘Failure’ Truly a Lack of Success?

In Spring of 2005, I began writing my first book.  It was going to be a simple workbook and so I thought it would take me about 3 months.  When my deadline hit, I wasn’t even half way through it and I spent about two weeks feeling as if I’d failed.  Then I set another deadline that I didn’t meet, and spent even more time feeling like a failure.

But was I really failing?

Success and Failure Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

To me, success is an internal measuring stick.  There have been times in my life when I have succeeded by everyone else’s definition and yet still felt as if I’d failed.  So I have defined it by measuring how closely I came to meeting my initial intentions, as opposed to how closely I came to meeting the outward goals and benchmarks.  I set both, but I know that I often have less control over the outward goals than I do the internal intentions.

For example, I may have the intention of learning a new article writing style and therefore set the goal of writing 10 articles in one day.  If I only write 5, have I failed or succeeded?  If I learned the style and feel comfortable with it, I have succeeded at the intention even though I failed at the goal.  If I write 10 articles, but still haven’t learned the style, I have met the goal but failed the intention.

Meeting the intention feels a lot more like a success to me than having met the goal.

I Never ‘Fail;’ I Learn What My Success Really Is

In my eyes, I only feel failure when there is a gap between what has happened, and what I think should have happened.  But what if what actually happened was perfect? 

If we learn from what happened and allow it to make us stronger, then it can become a ‘perfect’ experience of us. 

What Have I Learned?

My original intentions were: 1.  to complete and publish my first book to prove to myself that I could and 2. to help others find answers to the same questions about life I’d been asking.  Ultimately, I did finish the workbook.  It took me 10 months instead of 3, but the feedback I’ve gotten from it has been amazing.  It’s doing exactly what I created it to do, and it’s a success I can be proud of because both of my initial intentions have been met.

The real lesson though was in deciding that taking one step each day would be my measure of success.  So long as I was doing that, I was honoring my intention and, I knew, I would eventually finish.  The deadlines helped to keep me motivated and focused, but allowing myself flexibility was important too.  Eventually in the process, the deadlines became points in time to evaluate progress and decide the next steps rather than completion dates.

From this experience I learned a lot about how to develop my writing and I will use that knowledge on each new project for the rest of my creative life.

How to Never Fail Again

1. Always be clear about your intentions before beginning.  Ask yourself what is it that you want to gain from the experience and be clear about how you’re going to know when you have it.

2. Regardless of how the experience turns out, never ask a ‘why’ question like ‘Why did this happen to me?’  Instead, always ask yourself, ‘What have I learned?’ or ‘How can I learn from this?’

3. Don’t judge your success or failure based on the external goals set.  Use those as guidelines to keep you moving forward.  Instead, judge your success or failure based on whether or not your original intention was fulfilled. 

I can’t guarantee that things won’t go wrong or that life won’t be challenging.  But I can guarantee that you can learn and gain strength from any experience and in so doing, live without regrets or failures for the rest of your life.