Comments on: Career Ideas–Understand Failure http://www.choosingacareerblog.com/career-ideas/career-ideas-understand-failure CAREER IDEAS--Help for career changers and anyone seeking a career they will love Fri, 14 May 2010 16:28:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: admin http://www.choosingacareerblog.com/career-ideas/career-ideas-understand-failure/comment-page-1#comment-9 admin Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:38:09 +0000 http://www.choosingacareerblog.com/career-ideas/career-ideas-understand-failure#comment-9 Yes. It's not failure vs. success, like red light green light. It's a continuum of living that brings us a variety of experiences and ways to learn and grow, as you indicate. Robert Fritz, author of Creating, and The Path of Least Resistance, says that we need to get out of a performer mode (did it right, didn't do it right) which most of us are in, and get into a student or learner mode. I also find, as I indicated in the post, so many people take a little error and turn it into a big failure, which is the wrong lesson entirely. Yes. It’s not failure vs. success, like red light green light. It’s a continuum of living that brings us a variety of experiences and ways to learn and grow, as you indicate. Robert Fritz, author of Creating, and The Path of Least Resistance, says that we need to get out of a performer mode (did it right, didn’t do it right) which most of us are in, and get into a student or learner mode. I also find, as I indicated in the post, so many people take a little error and turn it into a big failure, which is the wrong lesson entirely.

]]> By: Barrie Hopson http://www.choosingacareerblog.com/career-ideas/career-ideas-understand-failure/comment-page-1#comment-8 Barrie Hopson Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:59:22 +0000 http://www.choosingacareerblog.com/career-ideas/career-ideas-understand-failure#comment-8 Couldn't agree more with your very perceptive comments. I am adding a couple of paragraphs from a new book that Katie Ledger and I are writing called There is Another Way: 10 Steps to Creating a Portfolio Career. This will be published by Bloomsbury in October and coincidentally I was writing a piece on failure for the final chapter when I came across your blog. For what it is worth this is what we have written: The word ‘failure’ is normally used pejoratively. Rarely can it be used descriptively as almost always it is someone’s opinion. And almost always what we really mean is that something that we have tried has not worked out. That is the be all and end all of it. Yet sadly we then label the experience as a failure and all too often then broaden that out to state that we are a failure. We believe strongly that we would not get far in life without some things going wrong for us. The challenge is to ensure that we learn from what went wrong. The early promoter of self-help, Samuel Smiles, put it elegantly at the turn of the 20th century: “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.” Couldn’t agree more with your very perceptive comments. I am adding a couple of paragraphs from a new book that Katie Ledger and I are writing called There is Another Way: 10 Steps to Creating a Portfolio Career. This will be published by Bloomsbury in October and coincidentally I was writing a piece on failure for the final chapter when I came across your blog. For what it is worth this is what we have written:

The word ‘failure’ is normally used pejoratively. Rarely can it be used descriptively as almost always it is someone’s opinion. And almost always what we really mean is that something that we have tried has not worked out. That is the be all and end all of it. Yet sadly we then label the experience as a failure and all too often then broaden that out to state that we are a failure. We believe strongly that we would not get far in life without some things going wrong for us. The challenge is to ensure that we learn from what went wrong. The early promoter of self-help, Samuel Smiles, put it elegantly at the turn of the 20th century:
“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”

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