Value Your Failures As Much As Your Successes

Everything I do, professionally, I look at as a learning process. That’s where the topic of failures comes in. Failure to launch, failure to do it right, failure to be selected, failure to be elected, failure to bring it home, failure to be perfect. 

I am naturally curious in the logic and reasons for failure as sometimes, we put exactly the same, often enormous effort and energy into things and for some reason, some things do pan out the way we want and sometimes they don’t. The first scenario is classed as success and the second is deemed a failure.

I remember as a young artist going to music auditions not knowing if I would be successful or unsuccessful. In my profession, and in the theatre and film industries, failure is a part of the job and while it’s never easy for an artist to go from one rejection to another, it is happens all the time. 

The best advice I have to give about the notion of failure of any kind is to never take it personally. 

NEVENA BRIDGEN

It’s a daunting feeling to keep investing in something that does not either progress at the speed you want it or as in business, not getting the results you were hoping for. Was it a mistake you tried anyway? Not necessarily.

To make a mistake, does not mean you have failed.

NEVENA BRIDGEN

Even a good project can fail

What I know to be unequivocally true is that even a good project can fail. Knowing this, I have learned to separate my mistakes from the overall project. As even mistakes can lead you to success, as long as you know that you have to learn from them. 

The reason why I am saying this is that you need not write off the whole project just because of a failure associated with it. When things are not producing the desired results, it is good to step back and ask yourself what am I missing here, is there another way to look at this?

If I were to give a piece of good advice to someone, I would say that failure is not pleasant, but it gives an opportunity to re-assess and re-evaluate whatever we are doing. 

I notice that many people take failure “as is”, a general outcome, the end result, a reason to give up or even worse, feel bad about yourself and your own abilities and future prospects to succeed. In my experience, the best at that moment is to analyze the mistakes and fix them next time.

Get The Right Outcome By Fixing The Failure

I have learned from my website developer while working on The Wives of Westminster digital project, that sometimes, there can be a slight mistake in the code. Once someone fixes the error in the code, you can immediately get the right outcome. It’s equivalent to the science of life. If you can see a mistake, then there is no reason not to fix it. But if you see it, don’t ignore it, do not refuse to take a look at it and do not write off the whole project because of it.

Trial and error is part of the process of anything we do in life. What I know to be true is that nothing is definite. We take failures too seriously. In a large scale of life, it does not count much, as long as we are learning from it. Even a failed project can be transformed and re-branded into a new one. Like Mike Cuban likes to say, “you only need to be right once.”

We learn nothing from success as obviously we won, we got what we wanted and so we will repeat the same  behaviour while it is successful until we lose. Only through mistakes, failure and defeat do we have an opportunity to learn, change strategy , redefine and try again. Life is a learning curve.

Nevena Bridgen

Founder

Nevena Bridgen is the Founder of The Wives of Westminster. She is an opera singer and a wife of MP Andrew Bridgen.

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