I have been honored and privileged to write for this magazine for two years. If you have been reading DARE 2B GREAT, then I thank you. It is you that drives me. My articles typically discuss training, nutrition, or adjusting workouts based on body type and lifestyle. I do a great deal of mental and behavioral training as well. Implementing the Body Scanner and Dare 2B Imperium App this past year has helped my clients excel and hit goals more quickly. Yet, the true power comes from our monthly meetings and goal/habit focus. We have always been a raw company, which continues in this article.

There has not been much in these last 20 months that would suggest any type of success—zero. This goes for not only my business but myself. You hear that life happens. Yeah, life happens. And it recruits little minions to further its purpose. So, I ask again…Is failure a defeat or a benefit? 

Failure can increase resilience and spur creativity, among other advantages. Our society is so competitive and focused on winning that we sometimes overlook the silver linings of failure. Failure can spur creativity and innovation, as well as confer other benefits.

Everyone can learn from failure, improving their resilience to the setbacks they will inevitably encounter in life. We live in a competitive society that has big winners and big losers. Educators, motivation experts, life coaches, sports psychologists, trainers, and other mentors mainly teach us how to approach success and how to be winners. Few teach us a much more valuable lesson—how to cope with failure.

A society that worships winners tends to make horrible choices, whether from a moral or a practical perspective. Consider the widespread practice of preferring job applicants with a near-perfect grade point average over those with more varied scores.

I was in education for ten years and then in the business world up to this point. The conventional view is that someone with a near-perfect GPA will become a near-perfect employee. Yet, there is a glaring flaw in this reasoning. A straight-A student is not a perfect person but someone who has never done badly in a course. This means that they have never really been tested. If they have not been tested to receive at least some weak grades, they have missed out on learning to cope with failure. Such individuals tend to be perfectionists, and this trait is associated with diminished resilience in response to failure.

Maybe you are the owner of a business. An untested employee can break down under fire from real-world difficulties and challenges. Even if they do not fall apart emotionally, they tend to be rigid, narcissistic, and uncreative. This can cross into many areas. In my world, an untested client doesn’t stay a client long or has success, but once success slows or they find something difficult, they stop coming or tell me they simply cannot perform the appointed task.

Although it might seem perverse to claim that prior failure is an advantage for a job candidate, contrary to the received wisdom of personnel recruiters, experiencing failure is the best qualification for any difficult occupation. I want to point out, however, that context matters. I am discussing situations where the goal was potentially achievable, not some inflated pipe dream. 

If I may lay some history down, on a first impression, the young Theodore Roosevelt was described as a “second-rate intellect, first-rate temperament.” Roosevelt survived many failures, from crashing out of politics to watching his cattle herd die. Of course, Roosevelt’s failures were balanced by a staggering list of accomplishments, from founding the environmental movement, working for world peace, and tackling poverty in America to busting monopolies and leading the country out of the Great Depression. Not bad for a one-term president.

So, what are the advantages of experiencing failure, if any?

People who fail repeatedly develop persistence in the face of difficulties. President Harry Truman was perceived as a flop but stuck to his guns when it mattered, such as firing the popular but insubordinate General MacArthur. Thomas Edison is remembered for the incandescent light bulb, among many other vital inventions in the Age of Electricity. He is said to have failed with a thousand filaments before hitting on a material that worked.

With success, people keep on doing the same thing. When they hit a wall, fall, or fail, they are forced to adapt and change. That is not just a human characteristic but constitutes a basic feature of how our brain works. When one combines emotionalism with originality, that is close to what most people think of as artistic creativity. Artists are not necessarily frustrated; they tend to be dissatisfied with their accomplishments and try to do something better or new. This can be compared to those who go to the gym or have goals requiring as much. It applies to all fields of human endeavor, including the crass activity of financial money-grubbing. 

Never underestimate the magical properties of failure. It increases resilience in the face of unfavorable outcomes and gets the creative juices flowing. So, in reality, you never really failed. Read that again.

By Cody Rininger