This is a commonly said phrase to many successful people, a way to say that making mistakes makes it easier to make the right decision over time, and it encourages you to feel better about your errors. But what’s important is to determine how to use our failures to learn, grow, and change.

It teaches us to be compassionate, kind, understanding, and to empathize with ourselves and other people. Everyone has failed at something at some point in their life, and failure is not a sign of weakness. It is just a way of finding things that do not work, as Thomas A. Edison has said: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson researched failing and discovered the three types of it: preventable, unavoidable, and Intelligent failures.

The preventable is known as the worst, and you can understand why since you would have the skill and ability to prevent it. The unavoidable or complex type is unpredictable and helps prevent future mistakes.

The intelligent or intellectual is a mistake that occurs while discovering, creating, launching, and trying something new, and it fails. This mistake is discussable, so it is unlikely to happen again. Failing can be a blessing or a curse by how you approach it. Any successful person can tell you a story about how they failed at something miserably, but the way they handled the situation made them successful. Accepting responsibility, not quitting, and being realistic with yourself is a better option than regretting and being angry. Your failures strengthen you, and the worst decision you can make in this situation is to quit. Because sometimes your failures turn out to be your best success story.

Dorotea Grkovikj