18 Reasons Why Failure is the Path to Success

Confidence is built through failure.

At first glance, that statement seems illogical. To some degree it is. In order to gain confidence we need to have a series of successive victories, but we don’t ever put ourselves in a position to achieve victories without also failing.

Life is a long game. We want victories and wealth and success overnight. Social Media and movies may have us thinking that we can get everything we want in life with a couple of tweets and a single night of hard work, but the reality is that it takes serious dedication and many failures to walk the road to success.

The first step to success is accepting that we aren’t always going to win. When stepping out of the comfort zone we are entering an unfamiliar space filled with obstacles we have no experience with and no matter how many books we read or Ted Talks we watch...failure is waiting around the corner. The only way to stay the course to eventual success is to adapt to failure and constantly be learning from it.

Here are 18 reasons from industry giants why failure is a stepping stone to success.

1.  “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” - Thomas A. Edison

2. “Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.” - Salvador Dali

3. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston S. Churchill

4. “A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

5. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy

6. “I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.” -  Benjamin Franklin

7. “If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.” -  H.G. Wells

8. “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” - Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth

9. “The phoenix must burn to emerge.” - Janet Fitch

10. “If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” - Ken Robinson

11. “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” - Denis Waitley

12. “We are all failures - at least the best of us are.” - J.M. Barrie

13. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” - Henry Ford

14. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” - C.S. Lewis

15. “Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.” - J.K. Rowling

16. “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” - Johnny Cash

17. “When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.” - Eloise Ristad

18. “There is no failure except in no longer trying.” ― Elbert Hubbard

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