Countless studies have been done about success and many blog posts have been written about it. Nevertheless, many people struggle with failure than they have trouble managing success. Since failure is the reality of many people, it is just as important to study it.
If as Napoleon Hill said; every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit, then failure can be turned into success. No matter how low the point you are in life is, you can rise like a phoenix and achieve astounding success. However, for this to happen, some questions need to be answered; why do people fail? How can failure be turned to achieve success?
In this post part of my journal today, you will learn the attitudes, habits, and character traits that lead to failure and how you can turn things around from negative to positive. Enjoy.
- Indecision
Decision-making can fuel anxiety. The inner conflict caused by this anxiety increases stress and reduces confidence. This applies to all kinds of decision making and it has stopped some people from taking the important steps needed to achieve success. Decision-making is essential in every walk of life.
When you can swiftly make decisions and take action, you’re more likely to achieve success compared to someone who is always thinking without a conclusion. When you are indecisive, it can lead to self-doubt. Other people will also doubt your abilities because of your indecision. Many people have failed or missed out on opportunities because they are known to be indecisive.
If you want to beat indecision, you have to be willing to take responsibility. Be ready to face the consequences of your actions. This means you can’t cure indecision by making hasty decisions. However, you have to know when to peg down your choices and start eliminating unnecessary options. Decision-making can become cumbersome when you have excess options. Avoid the paradox of choice by evaluating your options and calmly choosing the best course of action. By the way, if you wait to be 100% certain before making a choice, you will become indecisive. Be satisfied with a high level of accuracy.
- Doubt
We’ve all experienced times when we wonder whether we are good enough and doing well enough or not. Doubt is usually closer to us than we think, especially when faced with an unfamiliar challenge or when we’re in an unfamiliar situation. Sometimes, when we feel we are not good enough, we begin to doubt the decisions we make or actions we do. Doubt occurs when we lack that self-confidence or faith in our own abilities. It is different from healthy skepticism which encourages us to critically analyze ideas, perspectives, and plans.
Doubt can lead to failure if we allow it to fester. While you can feel fear at some point in life, focusing on it, feeding it, and allowing it to restrict your options will ultimately lead to failure. To overcome doubt, you must engineer your mind to focus on your competence, track record, and ability. Sometimes, doubt appears rational, but it is rarely so. While a certain degree of self-doubt is necessary to show that you’re not taking the weight of your responsibility for granted, you should not allow it to affect you and permeate every area of your life permanently. Once you are sure you’re not being overconfident and egotistical, you should not allow doubt to weigh you down.
- Fear
Everybody is scared of something. But with the way some people make progress in life, you will think they fear nothing. How do fear lead to failure and some people succeed in spite of their fears? The thing is that people who succeed have made peace with their fears. If you ask many of them, they take positive actions in spite of those fears. They don’t allow the fear of what can go wrong to stop them from working on what can work out. By the way, it is not a trial-and-error solution where they take blind steps. However, having applied due diligence to the work at hand, they delve into it headlong without allowing baseless feelings to get in their way.
In fact, people who succeed are known to go right ahead to do the things that terrify them. Their slogan tends towards doing it afraid than doing things unafraid. Indeed, to win in life, learn how to act regardless of your fears. If you wait till you have a 100% guarantee that things will work out, you won’t get the chance to take any step because such assurance doesn’t exist. When fear leads to failure, it can be immobilizing. So, you must acknowledge your fears but put them in their place. When you’ve done everything else right, don’t allow fearful thoughts, feelings, and emotions to stop you from taking necessary actions.
- Worry
Much like doubt, worry is hard to escape. Worry is like the reversed version of concern. It is good to focus on what you have to do to achieve success. But, when your assessment is accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of impossibility, then worry has set in. Anxiety is a chronic form of worrying and both do no good to anyone.
Worry can have an adverse effect on your health and wellness. This means the time you should spend solving problems and achieving greater feats can be spent tending to the after-effects of chronic worrying. If you want to turn your failure into success, you must learn to stop worrying and start solving problems. Instead of seeing your challenges from a position of weakness, view them from a position of strength. Even if you have genuine reasons to be concerned, seek objective solutions to the problems. Worrying can be so preoccupying, it can make you think you’re doing something useful when in reality, you are just wasting time and compounding the problems. What are the things you worry about? List them down and look for steps to take to stop making them an issue.
- Inaction
The easiest way to fail is to not take the corresponding action. Many times, people know what they should start doing or stop doing to live a better life. They know the friends they should stop hanging out with to break a bad habit. They know the course to take to increase their chances of getting a promotion at work. They know the language their partner wants them to stop using and that they will enjoy the relationship better if they make some adjustments. Unfortunately, many times, the things that we know we should do to make our lives more meaningful remain in the realm of knowledge. Many people simply refuse to put in the work to create the kind of life they envision for themselves. Taking action requires hard work. It is much easier to leave things to chances and assume yourself to be a victim of some sort. However, that is also an easy route to failure. If you want to achieve success, you must leave the category of people who know what to do but find one excuse or another to keep themselves from taking action.
Even if you have to take baby steps, ensure you’re making progress in your journey to achieve success. If you have to start by devoting one hour each day to your next big thing, do so. By the time you’ve spent six months at it, the result would have compounded. Taking action can be overwhelming when you only view the big picture. Break the picture into smaller concepts that you can work through within a short time frame.
- Self-made prisons
You are in a self-made prison when you refuse to let things go and allow fear, anxiety, cynicism, and addiction to govern your life. Self-imprisonment is internal because it begins in the mind. It has led many people to fail because they never even aspired to succeed in the first place. If you want to live a successful life and to inspire the same in others, you have to first influence them to believe in their intrinsic worth. They have to know that their value is independent of their past experiences, current challenges, and future problems.
Grant yourself the permission to be uncertain about some parts of your next steps. It’s not over simply because you don’t have all the answers. Thinking this way will liberate you from the barriers imposed by the limitations of your self-made prison.
- Ego
Many smart, talented, and competent people experience failures because of their egos. While they have many good things going for them, they easily destroy years of hard work by nursing an oversized ego. When you become too learned to be taught and think yourself above mistake, your ego is beginning to interrupt your success and if you don’t take caution, things may go downhill from there.
You must always maintain a healthy estimation of yourself – particularly in relation to others. If you think you are special, so are other people.
Conclusion
A lot of the things that cause failures are present among successful people. But successful people don’t feed them. Instead, they tackle them and take control. If you want to learn from your failures, stop living in denial. Own up to your weakness and feed your strengths.
