A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience.
Elbert Hubbard
Failures are part and parcel of life; no successful man can claim to never have tasted the bitterness of failure. In fact, failure teaches us a lot more than success can. Whether we learn from those lessons or not is what sets one person apart from another.
In many ways, failing to draw the right lessons from our setbacks is probably worse than failure itself. For starters, this inability derails our progress, pushing us off course in the pursuit of our goals. It also makes us more pessimistic and overly cautious in our future approach. As a result, we start shying away from dreaming big in life. Our battered self-belief eventually forces us into a shell, giving us the impression that we aren’t worthy of the things we hoped to achieve.
To err is human. The mistakes we make en route to fulfilling our dreams do not define us. They should rather strengthen our resolve to work twice as hard to get what we long for. Our blunders should also serve as a roadmap for us to try to do things differently. Sometimes, making those minor tweaks to our approach and attitude can work wonders.
Our bad decisions should not be a cause for regret, but introspection; they should not be looked at as the end of the road, but as the start of a new one. Failure is no cause for one to hang their head in shame, but one to look up and start working on becoming an even better version of themself.
Elbert Green Hubbard, popularly known as Elbert Hubbard, was an American author, artist and publisher. Hubbard once said: “A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience.”