The importance of thinking of failure as something positive

When practicing – regardless of the kind of practice; life itself is a practice – it can be extremely hard to recognise and accept mistakes, imperfections, uncertainties, setbacks.

And it is even harder to see those as something good, something that can point us towards learning, growth and improvement. Despite the internal fight this can create, I have no doubt that failing is an extremely positive experience. 

We need mistakes and drawbacks: they are like good friends, like a mirror giving feedback and reflecting what we think and do, in order to show us the direction we are taking and understand if that direction is good for us. We so often get angry when we do something “wrong” or when we cannot do it “the right way”. But right and wrong are social concepts only; they do not exist in the natural world. There is no right or wrong unless we compare ourselves with something or someone else, which have been in turn deemed good by someone else. 

By entering this judgement process, we forget to pay attention to what our mistakes are teaching us. We get so busy correcting the mistake that we miss its meaning, and we forget that there wouldn’t be knowledge without the trial-and-error process. Of course, we need success too, otherwise at some point we would stop trying. But it is failure that makes us grow and learn. 

This is probably one of the hardest life practices we can ever choose to focus on, especially because modern society pushes us in the opposite direction… but I think I will give it a try!