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“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure,” Bill Gates said.

We are all always at risk of encountering failure at one point or another. What truly matters is how one reacts to and learns from that failure instead of personalizing it, or trying to justify or ignore it. When I struggle with failure, I realize that I need to find a way to handle it and take it as an opportunity in a way that can lead me, ultimately, to success.  Therefore, I decided to write this blog post and share with you some lessons that I have learned. I hope that it inspires you to look at failure differently and motivates you to turn possible failures into your success.

• When you have failed, you have failed. Instead of blaming anyone (including yourself), accept it and use your energy to influence the future by acting consciously and reasonably.
• If you’re endeavoring to achieve anything, then failure is unavoidable. This suggests that you have to be prepared for failure before it happens, and learn how to minimize the fallout as well as how to take advantage of the upsides.
• Believe in yourself. Respect your abilities. Without being humble and at the same time reasonably confident in your own powers, you will not succeed.
• Get to know the roots of failure better. Try to find out its patterns. When and where did it initiate? How did it proceed? Why did you fail?
• Be open to critical feedback. Seek support from your critics and take advantage of their feedback. Analyzing the critics’ feedback will give you valuable clues to find your path to success.
• Seek inspiration. Inspiration is the engine that moves you forward on your path and makes it possible to overcome failure.
• Let your injured parts recover by focusing on upcoming endeavors. Failures are things to learn from, but not things to dwell on permanently.
• Get organized and move forward. Do not allow defeat to be the end. It is okay to fall down, but not to stay down. Do not forget that failure is a step on the stairs to your goals.

When you move along these lines, failure changes its shape from being the disheartening endpoint to only a twist in the long road to your goals. I am grateful that the road I am taking hasenabled me to add a new definition of failure into my life’s dictionary: Failure is a teaching moment that eventually can be a dress rehearsal for my success.

What has your experience been with failure?