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“I failed my way to success.”
-Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison has long been hailed America’s greatest inventor–and rightfully so. While he’s best known for inventing the electric light bulb, Edison also holds over one thousand US patents–and many more internationally. His life’s work has constructed life as we now know it.
Despite all his success, Edison was no stranger to failure. In fact, his failed attempts at creating the light bulb have become almost as legendary as his outstanding success. It took Edison 999 attempts before he was finally able to create the electric light bulb.
Edison learned from his failures, and used each lesson to move forward towards success. It wasn’t the 999 failures that defined Edison’s journey, but rather the one final success.
As Edison has proven, failure is often inevitable and unavoidable. It isn’t how we fail that matters, but rather how we use these failures. It’s only when we use failure as a learning opportunity that we’re able to move towards success.
Ask yourself these questions to discover how to harness the power of failure:
What is my current perspective on failure?
How does my current perspective on failure affect my mindset?
What areas in my life/work do I tend to see the most failures?
How do I currently react to failure?
What can I learn from my past failures?
Is there a pattern to my failures?
What’s stopping me from achieving success?
How can I mindfully change my current perspective on failure?
Often disappointment follows failure. Learn how to deal with disappointment and more in our 2-Minute Insight series.
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