06 Mar What Can You Learn From Your Last Big Failure?
IF WE LEARN FROM OUR FAILURES, WE CAN TURN THEM INTO VALUED FRIENDS
Failure is more common than success. The planning floor of history is littered with failures, from modest to spectacular.
On the modest end, the innovation department at McDonald’s created some items you will never see again:
- The Hula burger, which replaced a beef patty with a grilled pineapple slice. Bad idea this side of Hawaii!
- The McCrab, a frozen crab cake that tasted more like “low tide” than fresh crab meat.
- The McGratin Croquette, a deep-fried patty made of macaroni, potato, and shrimp that never caught on outside of New Orleans.
- The McHotDog, which never caught on with burger lovers.
- And finally, McOnion nuggets, which were clumps of diced onions that were breaded and fried like chicken nuggets. They never caught on with anyone.
Even a restaurant chain as successful as McDonald’s boasts an impressive list of failures.
Other failures have been more spectacular.
- Lighter than air blimps which were susceptible to explosion.
- Steam powered cars, which required you to tend a constant fire burning in the under belly of the machine.
- The boat/car, a car that could float, with a propeller to take you through water, which was only practical for people who needed to cross small bodies of water regularly.
- The Jet Pack, two rockets you could wear like a backpack and lift you off the ground, which would be wildly popular if it weren’t for the possibility of malfunctioning at 500 feet above the ground.
- And my personal favorite, the alarm bed which, when the alarm sounded, raised the head of the bed up 45 degrees and deposited you, awake or asleep, on the floor at the foot of the bed!
Even the Bible is punctuated with notable failures.
- Samson tops the list of those most likely to succeed, who didn’t.
- Solomon, who is normally thought to be a success, is accurately seen as a profound failure at the end of his life when he poured down the drain all the wisdom that he had in his early life.
- Jeremiah, a prophet who exhibited no personal failure, nevertheless was flamboyantly unsuccessful his entire life, in terms of ministry results.
This is of interest to many of us because of failures we have experienced in our own lives.
Failure can have an unnerving effect on us. If we don’t understand it, if we don’t know how to process it, if we don’t understand how God views it, it can make us feel like complete failures… as though we cannot do anything right… as though God has abandoned us because we are not “success” material.
This is how our failure/success math works: 1000 successes + 1 failure = 1 failure
On the other hand, if we can see our lives as God sees us, if we can understand how to process failure when we do things wrong, as well as when we do things right, we can transform failure into success, and failure can become a rich and valued friend.
What the Bible says about failure
- It says that we all fail: We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check. James 3:2
- It says we can recover: For a righteous man may fall seven times and rise again. Proverbs 24:16
- It says that God cares if we fail, and will help us: The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down. Psalm 145:14
- It says that we can learn from our failures: It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees. Psalm 119:77
So, the Bible gives us an essential starting point for beginning to understand our failures.
What experience says about failure
Beyond this biblical wisdom about failure, business and self-help literature is brimming with practical and valuable advice on how to learn from failure.
In a blog post by Michael Hyatt, former president of Thomas Nelson Publishers, he wrote of a time when he and his business partner suffered a very painful business failure. You can read Michael’s full article here, but here is a summary of some of his “lessons-learned-from-failure”:
Six components to turning failure to your advantage
- Acknowledge the failure. This is where it begins. Living in denial prohibits recovery from failure. Once you acknowledge failure, you take away its power. You can then begin to turn it into something positive.
- Take full responsibility. You won’t get anywhere as long as you blame others for your failure. But when you take responsibility for the failure and become fully accountable for it, you take back control. Suddenly you realize that you could have done things differently. You open the door to possibility—and to creating a different outcome in the future. But this can only happen when you acknowledge the failure and own it.
- Mourn the failure. Many times there are very real and serious losses. Often times there is collateral damage. Other people are hurt. Sometimes innocent people. It’s okay to feel sad about these things.
- Learn from the experience. Even failure can be redemptive if you learn something from it. It doesn’t have to be career-ending. In fact, it can be career-building—if you take the time to wring all the juice out of the lemon. Honestly, there are just some things you can’t learn—or won’t learn—without failing. Pain is a powerful teacher.
- Change your behavior. Philosopher and poet George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot learn from history are destined to repeat it.” And we really haven’t learned anything until it affects our behavior.
- Enter whole-heartedly into the next project. You can’t allow failure to hold you back from the next venture. If you fall off the horse, you have to get back on—immediately. You have to put the past behind you and move forward.
Beyond these six excellent points, there are two other steps we must take.
- First, we must assess our internal weaknesses that may have contributed to our failure
- Second, we must look at our external weaknesses to see what they contributed.
By taking these two other steps, then, as we tackle our next project, we can be sure we do not carry over into that next project the things that helped cause failure in the last. This requires an honest and careful look at ourselves. We will consider those steps, and more, next week.
Winston Churchill famously said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts!” As we exercise the courage to continue in our next project, may these truths guide and encourage us.
Until next week, if you’re struggling with feeling like you’re not “success material” and that God has abandoned you for “more important people”, you can read more about “gaining the courage to continue” in this post:
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