B ill Gates provided a practical perspective on the importance of learning from failure in his book Bill Gates @ the Speed of Thought , “Once you embrace unpleasant news not as negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren’t defeated by it. You’re learning from it.”
He then went on to list many costly Microsoft product failures that provided the learning and opportunity for development of many of Microsoft’s biggest successes, mentioning the following examples:
*Many apparently wasted years working on a failed database called Omega resulted in the development of the most popular desktop database, Microsoft Access
*Millions of dollars and countless hours invested in a joint operating system project with IBM that was discontinued led to the operating system Windows NT.
*A failed multiplan spreadsheet that made little headway against Lotus 1-2-3 provided learning that helped in the development of Microsoft Excel, an advanced graphic spreadsheet that leads the competition.
Clearly Bill Gates had a view of successful learning from setbacks that helped him and his company to turn many potential failures into dynamic successes.
Without a doubt one of the most powerful pillars of long-term success is learning from mistakes. The importance of learning from mistakes for achieving significant success is so widely recognized that it might almost seem unnecessary to mention.
A challenging, well-lived, and successful life will be filled with both ups and downs. Growing as a person and addressing significant real-world problems means we will surely fail some of the time, but if we learn from these failures and stay the course, we will eventually succeed.
Effective learning of challenging activities largely depends on how we think about failure. Just as we develop habits in our behavior, we also develop habits in our thoughts. And many of us have powerful thought habits about failure that include negativity and self-criticism and these demoralize us.
The result is that we impede the very learning that we need to help things work out better the next time around.
The challenge is to manage our thoughts about failures in such a way that we learn from them and consequently increase our personal effectiveness in our work and life.
If we can concentrate on learning from every situation, especially those in which we seem to fail, we will continually move ahead. This effective approach might be called learning forward. How can we learn forward through failures? To begin with, view short-term failures as the building blocks for future success and concentrate on learning all you can from them rather than trying to make excuses or trying to cover up these temporary setbacks. The trick is to always move forward as you fail.
For example, golfers would choose progressively more difficult courses and try more challenging shots as they progress in their game. At first, a relatively easy course and making conservative shot selections may represent the right amount of challenge. Over time, more difficult courses and more aggressive shots (trying to shoot over the trees rather than playing it safe and going around them) can be chosen. Undoubtedly the greater challenge will bring with it more mistakes and setbacks, but learning will increase as well.
As you master this process you can purposely choose new and greater challenges to learn from throughout your life that stretch you more and more. Fail at greater and greater worthwhile challenges, and you can learn on your way to ultimate long-term success.
Setbacks are simply evidence of a need for change and a chance to learn.
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