What does it mean when certain people say that failure is not an option? What does it mean to fail? The people who truly understand this statement don’t really believe that they won’t fail, or that it can’t happen. In fact, not only do they fully realize that failure is very much an option; they understand it’s inevitable. What that idea is trying to convey is that you should not stop at the first encounter of hardship. Failure is not an option because it’s not a stopping point. Instead, failure is a point which you can continue from and more importantly, a place that can speed up the learning process on your path to success.
One of the biggest roadblocks towards success is stopping short before your destination. It is very easy to stop short on your journey when you lack the big-picture thinking of what you want to accomplish. Without a good birds eye’s view of your goals, the destination that you are trying to reach, success, is hard to view beyond a horizon of failure. Most people get to failure but then stop in their tracks and let that define everything they were doing up to that point. They turn back, and by doing so, they never reap the benefits that getting to failure has to offer. That is when failure has become an option. By not pushing through the hardship, failure has become more than a checkpoint. It has become a destination. They reach one of the best learning opportunities but fail to take advantage of the potential knowledge available to them.
Failure is a simple checkpoint, a culmination of everything you’ve been doing up to that moment. One of the benefits is that it allows you to recalibrate and refocus more closely on the challenge you were trying to solve. You might have failed because of wrong assumptions, faulty decisions made, or just a misunderstanding of the actual problem and the tools needed to best address it. Whatever happened, failure shines a light on all of it and allows you to course-correct and get back on the right path. Those who fully understand what that statement truly means, that failure is not an option, always get to their destination. Because of that failure, they are allowed to reach even greater heights than before.
When you read this, I want you to think about everything you want to do. Understand that the road to prosperity will be challenging, failures, mistakes, times where it seems like progress is not occurring. But none of that will have any effect on you because even if you fail, it won’t be an option. You know where you need to go and nothing will stop you from getting there. That is how you will become successful.
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