Finding Opportunities in Failure

Failure is a temporary condition; it is not meant to stop you; it allows you to reassess your plans and get better.

I am the kind of guy that love having multiple plans, so most of the time, I will come up with plan A, B, C, D, for almost anything I want to accomplish. I always like to keep my options open so that I won’t feel terribly disappointed if things did not go as I planned. Having multiple plans has helped me stay flexible to quickly pivot to some other ideas and move toward my goals. However, recently I found myself in a situation where I have just one option. It is either my plan works; otherwise, I face disappointment that I always try to evade. And somehow, Murphy’s law prevailed on this occasion — everything did not go according to my plan.

This experience got me thinking, and I realize that part of the reason I love having multiple plans was the fear of failing. I always prepare myself ahead and give myself options to accept other alternatives in case my most desirable choice did not pan out. This is a flawed approach to making plans. It is not beneficial to make plans out of fear. So, I changed the approach, and I am now getting comfortable with having only one plan and just one choice. Yeah, the thought came, what if my plan did not work out? And my response is, I will find opportunities in failure.

Finding opportunities in failure means assessing your situation, learning from your experience, and exploring how you can find some good things out of the bad situation to help you move forward. To do that, you will need to shake off your disappointment quickly, bounce back, and not spend too much of your time dwelling on what went wrong.

Life is full of ups and downs, and failure is part of the success equation. Rather than avoiding or allowing it to prevent us from moving forward on our plans, we must learn to find opportunities in failure. Do you also love avoiding failure? If yes, you need to know that failure does not mean you have to stop, but you need to find other opportunities to move you forward.

I have found out that asking three reflective questions will help you find opportunity in failure. The questions will also help you to figure out a clear path forward. We often mistake focusing on what we did wrong or how other people were at fault when dealing with disappointments. Over-analyzing our failure by looking for mistakes will only hold us back and prevent us from making progress. Instead, you should ask the following questions:

Three questions

- What is the opportunity in this situation? — Helps you to find some rays of hope in the midst of the disappointment.

- What are the alternatives to explore? — Helps you to evaluate and assess other possibilities.

- What is the path forward? — Helps you to connect the dots and come up with the next thing you want to do.

Asking the reflective questions will liberate you from the shackle of your failure, get back on your feet, and figure out a path you need to take to move forward with other plans. When you have determined your next course of action, you need to know how to find opportunity in the failure you just experienced. Here are five ways to finding your next opportunity after failure.

The How

1. Embrace failure

We all love success; we are thrilled when we are successful in our endeavors but sad when we fail. We love to associate with successful people but run away from those who are not. We seem to forget that for every success story out there; there are instances of failure and that failure is not permanent; it is an opportunity to try again. If we let the fear of failure stop us from attempting, we will invariably incapacitate ourselves, and we will not be able to reach our full potential.

The next time you find yourself hesitating on your plans because of the concern that you might fail, you should look to Nike for inspiration and “Just do it.” Yes, you should plan, yes, you should strategize, yes, you should be careful, but don’t let the fear of failure stop you from moving forward.

2. Develop a lesson learned

The person who becomes better and ends up becoming successful is the one that learns from his or her failure. At this point, you need to ask yourself, what could I have done better? What would I do differently on my next attempt? These questions will help you develop lessons learned from your experience to ensure you become better and more formidable if you decide to make another attempt.

Learning from our mistakes or failure can also position us for more opportunities for success and help us accomplish more. Say you started a business, but somehow, the firm did not pick up as you desired. After many attempts to rescue your business, let’s say it ultimately failed. To explore opportunities in failure, you wouldn’t give up and say owning a business is not for you. You will make another attempt, maybe in another line of business, but this time, you know what works and what doesn’t in a company. And that’s the perfect way to fail forward, learn the lessons, and make another attempt.

3. Create workaround

Creativity is essential if you must find opportunities in failure. You must be an outside-of-a-box thinker. You must be a critical thinker and able to see opportunities where others are seeing problems. So, what was it that stopped you on the last attempt? You should figure out another way or option before you make another attempt. Doing the same thing, the same way, and expecting a different outcome is not just realistic.

I’m sure you are aware of Thomas Edison’s famous quote that he had not failed, but he found ten thousand ways that won’t work. I can guarantee that he did not repeat what he did with his first attempt on the ten-thousandth trial. He kept learning and improving as he pushed forward with the idea of creating a light bulb. You can learn from Thomas Edison by devising a workaround when you experienced failure and never get bogged down by temporary setbacks.

4. Press Forward

Whenever you missed the mark and fail to achieve your plans, you have two choices. You either give up, or you press on. Giving up makes the temporary disappointment becomes a permanent failure. Giving up means you deny yourself the opportunity to succeed in your endeavor. The right thing to do is to press forward. If you are determined to achieve your goal, then you must be willing to get up and move on.

Pressing forward does not only mean that you need to continue on your initial path, but it means you can now explore multiple options since you know what works and what doesn’t. Pressing forward shows that you have confidence in yourself and your ability to achieve your goals, and it is by so doing that you can ultimately achieve your goals.

5. Capitalize on your strength

We all have strengths and weaknesses. It will benefit you to play to your strength. If you focus on what you are good at, you will improve your chances of succeeding. While it is an excellent idea to improve on our weaknesses, playing to our strengths will help us get better results. Most people that have achieved great feats did so because they capitalized on their strengths.

Michael Jordan is known today as one of the best basketball players of all time, but what many did not know was that Michael also had a brief stint as a baseball player, but he was not successful at it. Usain Bolt, who was widely considered the greatest sprinter of all time, also made a career change as a soccer player. Needless to say, he couldn’t make it because playing soccer was not in his wheelhouse. He couldn’t become a professional soccer player. Your strength, your experience, your talents are essential ingredients necessary to achieve your goals; make sure you put them to use.

Failure is a temporary condition; it is not meant to stop you; it allows you to reassess your plans and get better. Don’t turn it into a permanent situation by abandoning your dreams; you must bounce back from the setback by finding opportunities in failure.