Failure is a Stepping Stone to Success Failure: it is a concept we all fear. It is easy to feel pressure from parents, peers, teachers, and bosses to succeed in everything we do. However, we often forget that all things take practice. In fact, many successful people fail at their trades many times before they finally succeed. What does this tell us? It tells us that failure is actually one of the best teachers. Failure is not a measure of what one cannot do, but rather what one can do to improve. In this age of social media, it is easy to forget that life is challenging for everyone. We see our friends, relatives, and acquaintances posting about their new jobs, new opportunities, new relationships, etc. We forget that we are just seeing finished products in the long, hard road it took for our loved ones to get there. Another example of this is when we see a movie. We get to see the finished product of that movie after all of the hard work is done. We don't see the screenwriters struggling in the writer's room, the hiring process, the actors' painstaking hours rehearsing lines, the camera work, etc. Every movie is likely to have its own mess-ups, retakes, and set disasters. The good news about success is that the skill traits it takes to be successful are all ones that can be learned, not ones we are endowed with - or not endowed with - at birth.
Success is measured by drive, hard work, dedication, willingness to improve, willingness to accept criticism, perseverance, and persistence. All of these traits can be learned by everyone. If we can begin to see failure as a stepping stone to success, we can begin to love our failures for what they teach us. We can understand that our failures are actually setting us up for future successes. Failures teach us the hard lessons. It teaches us what we need to improve on. In fact, without failure, it seems we wouldn't be able to succeed at all.