Taking on a new project, starting a new career, trying to lose weight or beginning a new hobby can be a scary time. If quick or immediate success is not achieved it is easy to quit. It is very easy to consider yourself a failure and stop trying. I would urge you to stop this pattern and think of the little failures as an opportunity to grow and learn.

A few years ago I watched my daughter (who tends to remind me of a lot of life lessons) discover about ten ways of how not to climb up on a piece of gym equipment. She likes to go to the gym with her dad and we are fortunate enough to have a gym close by that has no problem with me bringing my child. Anyways, she became fascinated with climbing up on a back exercise machine. It has a raised platform with a seat and a padded bar behind the seat you move backwards to work your lower back.

She was only a few inches taller than the platform and could not reach the seat. Her first effort consisted of slipping off the platform and landing flat on her bottom. Her second attempt was better, but she could not keep grasp of the spinning padded bar. I watched her try again and again, each time getting a little closer to success. After about ten or eleven attempts she finally managed to make it up on the seat, stood up and said “Daddy, look at me”. I remember thinking, “great, you climbed up on a piece of gym equipment”.

Today I look at that event in a totally different light. It would have been easy for her to land on her bottom and get up and walk away. Instead, she remembered every attempt that did not work and changed the way she approached her next effort. SHE LEARNED FROM HER LITTLE FAILURES.

Every little failure we make in life is nothing more than a learning experience. Successful people realize that little failures are actually small successes. If we learned from a failure then a positive result was accomplished. If you can grasp this concept, you will learn to fail big! If little failures lead to small successes just imagine what failing big can lead to!

To this day my little girl has daily failure’s, she has double the amount of successes. She will try and try until she accomplishes her task. I can only hope that my daughters will to succeed will continue to inspire me in the tasks I attempt and that I will continue to fail big!