Learn from Your Past Failures

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2

   In order to achieve personal growth, expansion, and evolution (true success) in and through any given endeavor, you must lay the foundation of completing a sold track record of accomplishment along the way. Small progress in small things leads to greater progress in larger things. By building incremental progress into whatever you are doing now, you lay down a history and pattern of personal growth that will follow you into the future. However, it does not follow that your failures in small things will lead to your failures in larger things. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite.

   The personal success that comes to you because of your forward growth and development is not related to luck or good fortune. It is the result of a process. The process of success includes learning and practicing seven proven success principles. The first of these principles is one of the most important lessons that you must learn early in your quest to succeed in whatever area you have chosen. You will not know the success you were meant to achieve if you do not learn from your past failures.

   Part of completing a solid track record of personal growth is learning from the failures that will inevitably come to you along the road to your ultimate success. Life is so organized that progress cannot be made without facing and overcoming personal failures. Evolutionary progress always requires new learning. Thus, you cannot learn something new by doing the old thing you did yesterday. When you try something new today, you will almost always fail again and again, until you find out why the new thing you are trying today does not work. This is the reason for learning from your past failures. The old dictum is true: “Nature, unaided, fails.”

   To learn from your past failures, you must understand that part of the process of becoming successful (personally expanding and evolving) is moving through failures without being discouraged or disheartened to the point of quitting, thereby giving up on the dream you have imagined your life will become.

   To learn from your past failures is to embrace the teaching that you must be self-confident enough to take risks, but wise enough to assess the risks, consider the rewards, and then proceed with boldness. If you have done your homework properly, then when you fail you can pinpoint where you went wrong. You may have begun with the wrong assumptions, insufficient facts, or dependence on an unreliable source. Wherever you went wrong, whatever you have miscalculated in the environment, or whoever you misjudged, overvalued or undervalued will become the lesson plan you use to learn, grow and add to your store of wisdom. 

   To learn from your past failures is never to lose your boldness and self-assured status on the one hand, and always to gain humility and even more fearlessness on the other.