Are you afraid to fail? Does the idea of making mistakes haunt your dreams? Would you rather not do something at all as opposed to trying and potentially failing?

Some people like to motivate their teams by saying that failure is not an option. I think this can be a motivating statement, but I don’t think it is realistic to plan not to fail. Mistakes are a part of life, especially when trying something new.

Making mistakes does not make you a failure. Instead, we can learn from our mistakes. They teach us what does not work and when we know what does not work, we can keep trying something new until we find what does work. This means that making mistakes leads to knowledge, not failure.

Author John C. Maxwell wrote a book about failure. He called his book “Failing Forward”. The idea is that you can move forward by failing. My understanding of the ideas presented in this book is that you will make mistakes on the path to success, but you can keep moving forward by trying new approaches after making a mistake. The only way you will truly fail is if you give up after making a mistake. So don’t give up after making a mistake. Keep persevering until you achieve success.

I suggest you throw out the statement “Failure is not an option” and replace it with the statement “Failure is an option”. If your motto is “Failure is an option”, then you are committing to persevering despite any mistakes you make along the way. This means that mistakes will merely be stepping stones on your path to success.

As a computer programmer I like to try new things. For example, I recently decided to add music to a 2D roleplaying game that I created. I had never tried this type of programming before, so this was a new venture for me. I went ahead and found some free music online from the https://freesound.org/ website. I then did some Google searches to find out how to add music to my game.

I tried adding music using the DirectX DLL, which is a type of code library that I can reference from my coding project. I wrote the code to use this DLL, but for some reason it would not play the music files I had downloaded. At this point, if I had given up, I would have failed and my game would not have music.

Despite the failure of my first attempt at adding music to my game, I decided to do further research. This time I found out about the SoundPlayer class, which is available from another DLL. I changed my code to use the SoundPlayer class, and this time the music I downloaded played for me. My game now had music!

This was a new accomplishment for me. I had successfully added music to my game. If I had given up after I had failed to use DirectX to add music to my game, I would never have found my new solution that worked. Instead, I failed forward by making some mistakes and then trying something new.

Conclusion

Fear of failure is a barrier to progress. If your fear of failure stops you from trying something new then you have truly failed. Instead of being afraid of failure, be willing to try something new, even if you make mistakes. You will learn from the mistakes you make and then you will know how to avoid making those mistakes in the future.

Instead of saying “Failure is not an option”, embrace the idea that “Failure is an option”. When you believe that “Failure is an Option”, you are committing to the idea that you can make mistakes but that you won’t let mistakes stop you. You are embracing the idea that you will move forward even after making mistakes. As John C. Maxwell says, you can fail forward.