Celebrate Your Failures; How to translate failures into a learning experience

By Anthony Oluyinka Adesile | Feb 20 2025

Everyone knows who Thomas Edison was. People like talking about him and his many inventions. His renowned demonstration of electric lighting in 1882 transformed the world that you and I live in today. It was a spectacular demonstration birthed by a resilient attitude that contravened human perception of the word ‘failure’. He had learnt the values of failing and used it to his advantage. Edison matured to see failure as a learning process that someday would bring success!

You can be another Thomas Edison. You can rise up above your failures and make a difference. Think about where you have failed or given up. Did you really think that was the end of the road for you? Has your boss given up on you? Did you fail to meet your target at work? Have you let some people down and feel like melting out of existence? Have you let yourself down in some way? Failure is an interruption on your way to up. Don’t be permanently helpless. Take that failure, correct it and move on! The following tips should help you:

1. Change Your Mindset. What’s your attitude to failure and how does it affect you? Are you weighed down more by how you think people see you or by how much you judge yourself? You know what? ‘Fear defeats more people than any one single thing in the world’, says Emerson. It’s time you stop whining and start winning! Change your mindset. When you focus on the conditions brought about by failure, you begin to see inadequacy, fear, reproach – you get more exposed to the malignant that saps you of your drive to attain your desired future. How about focusing on the positive. It’s not the end of the world for you, yet.

2. Take Cue from Others’ Experiences. I have just made reference to the courage of Thomas Edison. There are many examples around to draw strength from. Think about many who had fallen and yet risen to become celebrated achievers. You can be one of them too. I read in the December 1997 edition of Management Today about how a CEO absorbed his 20 – 30 million dollars in personal loss during the 1997 Wall Street crash and launched three take-overs. What caught my attention was how this CEO inspired Cellular One managers in San Francisco to build an entire cellular network in half the previous record time.

3. Learn From Your Own Experience. Have you ever seen failure as part of learning? Difficult you may say but not impossible. We have just mentioned the first part – overcoming your fears. The second critical part is what you do with your failure. You cannot just shake away failure and pretend that it was not there. You must need to focus on the learning. What have you learnt from the experience? Do you truly understand the process that led to the failure? Would you have done it better and how? Is there an attitude or behaviour you need to change? Think, think, think and change! Sceptics called Thomas Edison a failure over his attempts at making light by using electricity at a time when many thought gaslight had come to stay. His reply was, “I have not failed. I have only discovered 10,000 ways that didn’t work”. These same people applauded him when his resilience paid off.

4. Communicate What You Have Learnt. Maturity comes with being consistent in your learning experiences. Experiences are values that you learnt to live by, which have become part of you over time. It is what you communicate to everyone. If what you have learnt is inconsistent with what you communicate, then no learning has effectively taken place. Failure translated into a learning experience takes courage and determination. Once a decision is made, stand by it and be consistent in your resolve until your learning becomes you. Consistency is the wheel by which the world knows that you are evolving, learning and changing positively. It is what earns you respect and makes you become a superstar.

Think How Not To Fail. Strange as it may seem, the best way to avoid failing is to avoid not to fail. Good thinking births good planning, and good planning results in novel performance. Bear in mind, however, that good thinking and planning often get tried and tested in the valley of experience. So when you feel as if you are failing, mind you. You are neither failing nor falling. You are very close to success. So keep at it until you break-through.