For a week or so, my son has been failing, he constantly fails, every day, every hour but he is so adamant that he won’t give up; he tries and tries again – and fails for the unknown-th time (yes he has failed that much); He has spent majority of his life failing; almost all 11 months of it.

To him, it’s not failure, to him, he is learning how to walk, or eat, or talk.. just like his sister did, and my better half, myself and almost everyone I’ve known.

At any given point there are thousands of seminars going on about “Success” and how you can learn “how to succeed”; some will teach you how to be successful at flipping houses, investing, growing a business, setting up an eCommerce shop that takes a few hours per week where you can set your own hours and “like Bob, make $10,000 per month” with the disclaimer that these results are not typical….

….But what about failure? Who teaches you how to fail successfully?

While there are lessons to be learnt from others in being successful; these lessons are based on other people’s failures and what they learnt from them – they learnt to fail, successfully.

We are born with a “learn by trying” and “learn from failure” behavior but at some point many of us lose it because we are taught that failure is bad.

While “success” is the end-result or the goal that we wish to attain, we really should tell ourselves that “it’s okay to fail” (avoiding obvious failure paths and not self-inflicting intentional failure) and we should be trying to figure out how to fail successfully; “I failed, I’m now going to get up and try a different approach” – you have to be okay with failing.

Unless we try and push our limits and drive towards the point of “possible failure” we wont discover our potential.

In leadership, failing successfully is important as it tells your followers that you too are human; that its okay to be wrong, and that you learn from it; that its okay to try something different and experiment. I don’t have all the answers for my teams and I try various different things to find answers that work – I end up with a lot of failures before I end up with success.

You have failed successfully when you have failed, learnt from that failure and have gotten back up to try again.

Keep failing.