Too Big to Fail?

Too big to fail. It’s a phrase that we hear often these days. We’ve been told that investment banks were too big to fail, AIG was too big to fail, and of course the automotive industry is definitely too big to fail. It has made me think a lot about failure and its consequences. Is failure really such a bad thing?

Failure is defined as a lack of success. And success is defined as a favorable or desired outcome. So failure is simply the lack of a favorable or desired outcome. Since we all want success, maybe failure is a bad thing. I’d rather think of failure as a step to success. We rarely get the desired outcome the fist time we attempt anything, so this implies we’ve failed. Now, if we quit here then yes we’ve failed. But it’s what we do with this failure that makes the difference. If we learn something from our first attempt, modify what we did the first time, and try then again, we might achieve success. It’s the failures that teach us what we need to know to achieve success. You know the old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” It’s really saying, “If at first you fail, try, try again.”

Many people that we consider very successful had their share of failures before achieving the success that they are well known for. Did you know that Milton S. Hershey failed in the candy business three times? He didn't achieve success until his fourth attempt. Thomas Edison had thousands of failures before he was successful at finding the right filament for the light bulb. To Edison each failure meant that what he was trying to do couldn’t be done and that he had to try something else.

Thank goodness that these men and many, many others did not adhere to the “Failure is not an option” school of thought. They were willing to accept failures as steps to success. I think that they would tell us, “Quitting is not an option."