Failure Does Not Exist

Does failure actually exist?

Buckminster Fuller said, “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.” That means you didn’t actually fail, things just didn’t turn out quite the way you expected. Now you get to do something different and see what that creates.

You get to keep making new and different choices. That’s great news, right?

As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” You get to keep going! You don’t have to stop and wallow in your failure because you didn’t fail, you merely found another way that didn’t work that you can now remove from your list of choices!

When I first read those quotes years ago, I thought “WOW, what a relief. I don’t have to make myself wrong for failing because I didn’t fail! What choice can I make now? What is next?”

It allowed me to keep moving forward. Removing things from my checklist that didn’t work and finding new things to do, new choices to make, new methods to test.

I didn’t have to judge myself and my efforts as failures. I didn’t and don’t have to sink into the pit of failing, I merely have to move to the next choice!

I had to change my point of view of what that “unexpected outcome” really was. It’s a matter of perspective.

Rather than being a failure, it was now an unexpected outcome that yields an opportunity to make a different choice, to take a new path, open a previously unseen door!

I realized that just because something worked for someone else, doesn’t mean it will work for me; and that doesn’t make me a failure. It simply means that I have to ask more questions.

What would work for me?

What other choices do I have that I haven’t considered?

What’s next?

Again, it’s all a matter of the perspective that you take.

Which perspective will you choose?

Are you ready to drag yourself out of the failure pit you created for yourself?

Are you ready to hose yourself off, washing all that failure, judgment and labeling off, straighten your clothes and say, “OK universe, what’s next? Let’s GO!”

It’s a new day!

Time for a new way!

Let’s GO!

Looking for more questions that can change the way you look at life? Get my ebook “Questions to Change Your Life” by clicking here.