Failure: Not The First Choice, But Not The Worst

Throughout your lifetime, it is prevalent to immerse yourself in a multitude of experiences to gain the knowledge of the world around you. These experiences will not always go your way, but you need not over-emphasize the bumps in the road of your journey.

As a young adult, you may take on the challenge of college or other forms of further education. If college is the route that you are choosing to take, then you may be faced with copious amounts of opportunities to showcase different skills and talents that you may possess.

Of these opportunities, you may run into clubs or organizations along the lines of: speech and debate, theater, newspaper, or your student government. You may also be inclined to partake in sports for your college if your passion is as such.

Regardless of the pathway that you take, nothing is perfectly easy for everyone, and no one is able to completely excel in everything that they will attempt in their lifetime.

As Bill Gates once said, "It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure." What can be taken away from this quote is to never let your failures go unnoticed. If you do let them, then you take away your own opportunity to learn.

If you make a mistake and do not succeed at something, it is alright to be discouraged, but you do not want that to differ you from continuing to grow and figure out how to avoid the same mistakes, or similar ones, in the future.

Going back to the idea of taking on experiences, mentioned earlier in this piece, renowned author J.K. Rowling once said, "It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all -- in which case, you fail by default."

Rowling saying this signifies the fact that never attempting an experience or challenge is just as bad as failing something itself. Meaning that even though you may fail at something, you should still take the opportunity to test yourself in any given scenario.

The fact of the matter is, failure is one of the constants of life. It will always find its way into your life without any legitimate warning. And, although you may convince yourself that you will not succeed in different aspects of your life, you can never guarantee that you are destined to fail.

Just imagine, if you lived life in a constant state of fear, based off the expectation of failure, how will you learn to do things the right way to have a consistency of positive outcomes within your life?

That's the thing -- you have to take life by the horns and try your best. No matter how you may mess up along the way, failure is natural, and you only have the outcome to learn from, not to hinder.