Most people spend their entire lives working hard to avoid failure. But if you read advice from people like Dangote, Mike Adenuga, Femi Otedola and others who have blazed the trail of success in Nigeria, the common thread is that you must learn to embrace failure if you want to succeed. It can sound crazy, but there are some good reasons why you have to fail before you can embark on a great career.
Failure Brings Out Passion
The people who find it easy to start a task but then drop out of it when things get difficult are dabblers. A dabbler is someone who tries many things, but never truly feels passionate about anything. Many people in Nigeria today are dabblers. They try out different businesses, careers, jobs, bosses, political parties and even partners. You will never be able to understand what your passion is and what direction your career should go if you’ve not taken failure to heart.
Failure Is Fuel For Success
When people point out your failures, it becomes easy to see what you are truly passionate about. If you fail at something and get ridiculed about your failure, then you will usually either drop that task completely, or you will develop a “does it matter?” attitude and strike out to show that you can succeed. Without the ridicule of failure, you will never embrace your true passion.
Failure Allows You To Stop Wasting Your Time
If you do not care about your failures, then you do not have the proper passion to pursue those interests as careers. When failure does not strike you as an urgent wake-up call, then failure prevents you from wasting your time on activities you are not passionate about.
Failure Helps You To Develop Hobbies
A successful career is something that you pursue against all odds and work hard to achieve. When you fail at a task, then you use your attitude towards failure to decide how you will approach that task in the future. You don’t have to give up on everything you are indifferent about failing at. Sometimes failure introduces you to hobbies that can be essential in reducing stress and freeing up your mind to pursue your true calling.
Failure Helps You Separate Your Goals From Other People’s Goals
When you are just starting the university, your parents may have goals for you that you unconsciously adopt as your own goals. But when school begins and you find that failing those classes does not motivate you, then you have started the process of separating your career goals from the goals of your parents. It can be a painful process, but you can use your attitude towards failure to help create your own career path.
Failure Shows You What You Are Not Good At
One of the most significant ways that failure helps you find a great career is that failure simply shows you what you are not good at and what you are unable to do. An epic failure at a task that you had an interest in can help you to put that task behind you and move on towards your real career goals.
Failure Gives You A Strong Foundation
We learn how to succeed by remembering how we failed. In your pursuit of a great career, remember all of your failures and take the lessons you learned from those incidents and use them to develop the great career you have always wanted. This is the attitude of most truly successful Nigerians and indeed all successful people the world over.
