It's Okay to Fail

Fail. It’s such a dirty word, or at least I thought so until my 6 year old told me “Mummy, FAIL stands for FIRST ATTEMPT IN LEARNING”.

Firstly, nobody argues with the logic of a 6 year old, and secondly, why did nobody tell me this before? Sure it’s just an acronym that her school composed, to help little kids feel better about themselves, but if it works on kids, does that mean it can’t work on bigger kids, aka adults?

Hear me out:

Failure does different things to different people, but for the majority of us, failure can be pretty crushing. When we take a chance on ourselves or on others and we are met with failure it can be incredibly difficult to pick ourselves back up and start again. However, viewing this ‘failing’ as simply a first attempt in our journey to success, certainly does take the sting out of the pain of failure.

There can be very (very) few people in the world who have gone through life without any failure. Perhaps they failed a test, lost a football game, failed in a relationship or failed in business. Whatever the case is, we can take heart in knowing that if we have failed at something, we are in good company. Look into the backgrounds of some of our most celebrated success stories; Steve Jobs, James Dyson, Vera Wang, Richard Branson, Sir Alan Sugar, Oprah Winfrey. All highly successful individuals, all with histories of failure.

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you have lived so cautiously that you might not have lived at all- in which case, you fail by default” - J.K. Rowling

So many of these success stories start with not one, or two, but numerous failings. The individuals themselves are often heard saying that it is their failure that made them successful.

First Attempts In Learning are invaluable experiences, which teach us things about ourselves that we could learn no other way.

Lets clean up that dirty word ‘Fail’ and instead wear it as a badge of honour, just as the many successful men and women that go before us do.