Because our society puts such a big emphasis on success we often feel deep shame when we fail. The shame of failure will stick you to your past.

I am intimately acquainted with failure. I did not make many the little league team. My first marriage ended in divorce. Two different careers ended abruptly because I was having personal and mental health problems. I’ve had to come back from two serious mental health crises.

But I know that failure is not unique to me. Because we are  human, everyone fails at one time or another. We all screw up.

There are two important lessons I’ve learned from failure. The first lesson is summed up in the words of a Japanese proverb: “fall down seven times, stand up eight.”

Every time I have fallen I have gotten up again. Persistence, determination, and perseverance conquer failure. In my first post in this series I said “life isn’t fair, it’s what we make it.” Life is hard and sometimes unfair. It will knock you down again and again. The secret to success is getting back up.

As a young woman, J.K. Rowling gave up her dream of writing novels to study something more practical. She ended up as an unemployed single mom “as poor as possible to be in Modern Britain without being homeless.”

But during this rock-bottom time, she realized she still had a wonderful daughter, an old typewriter, and an idea that would become the foundation for rebuilding her life. Perhaps you’ve heard of Harry Potter? “You might never fail on the scale I did,” says Rowling, “But it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all–in which case, you fail by default.”

You will screw up. You will fall down. Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

The second lesson failure has taught me is this: “fail forward.”

Every time I have failed I have learned something about myself and the causes(s) of my failure.

When we learn from our failures and apply what we’ve learned we “fail forward,” we grow and improve as human beings. Good people are good because they have come to wisdom through failure. Success does not consist in never making mistakes, but in never making the same one a second time.

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay not defeat. It’s a temporary detour, not a dead end.” Dennis Waitley

There is no shame in failure unless we fall and choose not to get up or we fail and refuse to learn from our mistakes. You will screw up! Fail forward!

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Next time: Your past is not your future when you find your one thing and pursue it with passion.