Get something wrong. Do something badly. Achieve nothing and make certain to fall short of your goal.

Get out there and fail!

No one brings it up but in business and in life failure is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, if you know how to use it. Think of how many little, annoying missteps in your career have saved you from great big piles of trouble later on.

Think about how many times you’ve tried, failed, cried, complained and gone on to use that failure to achieve something ten times greater.

The secret power that serial failures have, the power that all of us would do well to learn is fearlessness. The best among them understand the simple fact that while none of us has the ability to completely control our circumstances — the only chance we have to do anything worthwhile is if we allow for the possibility of failure and instead of shunning it completely, work to ensure that failures only happens when they absolutely have to.

Besides the lessons that you learn directly from failure, you know, like maybe your idea of making Bacteria themed toilet tissue might be a bust and that you really only need to rent one airliner for the company trip to Cabo, there are the intangibles, things like patience, creativity and most importantly the ability to extract good from even the worst situations.

Failure teaches us to use our resources more effectively, and it teaches us that there is an effective use for all resources (even the bad ones). If you look at the life of any great creator, you’ll see that they were failures up (some spectacularly so) until the day they made it happen and when they did, all those lessons kept them from drawing defeat from the maw of victory.

Next time you lose, fail or otherwise don’t get something you think you deserve — take a moment to smile at your good fortune. Who knows, you might have just saved yourself a much bigger defeat not too far down the road.

While you’re here, why not tell me about the biggest lesson you’ve ever learned from failure?

(Images) (Forum)