Getting It Wrong Is How You Get It Right

Failure isn’t the opposite of success. Failure is the mechanism that produces it.

We’re taught to avoid failure at all costs. To plan better, prepare harder, and make fewer mistakes so we can “get it right” the first time. Failure is framed as evidence that something is wrong with our intelligence, our discipline, our potential. But this belief sabotages growth.

Every meaningful skill you admire — clarity, confidence, creativity, mastery — was built through repeated failure. Through small, often invisible misses that forced adjustment.

Failure works because it gives you what success cannot: information.

When something fails, reality talks back. It tells you what doesn’t work, what needs refinement, what assumptions were false. Success, especially early success, can be misleading. It can convince you that your current approach is sufficient, even when it’s fragile. But failure removes illusion. It strips things down to what’s real.

This is why progress rarely feels good while it’s happening.

Learning to ride a bicycle is mostly falling. Learning to write is mostly deleting. Learning to speak confidently is mostly awkward sentences and missed timing. If you removed failure from the process, you wouldn’t get a cleaner path — you’d get no path at all.

Psychologically, failure also does something crucial: it builds tolerance.

Most people don’t quit because they lack talent. They quit because they haven’t developed the nervous system capacity to stay present when things go wrong. Failure stretches that capacity. Each time you survive it — socially, emotionally, practically — you teach your brain, I can handle this. That lesson compounds.

Over time, failure stops feeling like a verdict and starts feeling like feedback.

This is where the real advantage appears.

When you’re no longer trying to avoid failure, you take better risks. You experiment more. You move faster. You stop wasting energy on perfection and redirect it toward iteration. Ironically, this makes you more competent, not less.

Look closely at people who seem unusually effective. They’re not failure-free. They’re failure-fluent. They know how to extract value from what didn’t work and move on without excessive self-punishment. That skill alone creates separation.

Failure also humbles the ego in a way success never does.

It breaks the illusion that outcomes define identity. You learn that you can fail and remain intact. That insight is liberating. When your self-worth is no longer tied to immediate results, you gain access to focus, curiosity, and long-term thinking.

This is why avoiding failure often leads to stagnation. Playing it safe protects your image, but it starves your growth. You stay in the zone of what you can already do, mistaking comfort for progress.

Failure, on the other hand, demands evolution.

It forces you to ask better questions:
What am I missing?
What needs to change?
What can I try differently next time?

Those questions are the engine of mastery.

So if you’re failing, frequently, publicly, ungracefully, it doesn’t mean you’re behind. It often means you’re closer than you think. Especially if you’re paying attention.

The key is not to fail blindly, but deliberately. Fail forward. Fail with reflection. Fail with the intention to adjust rather than retreat.

In the long run, the people who win are not the ones who avoided failure.
They’re the ones who learned how to use it.

Failure isn’t a detour on the path to success.
It’s the door you have to walk through.

Everyone who’s good at something started by failing. The difference is that they didn’t stop there.

And neither should you.

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Cynthia A. Murungi

Hey there! Welcome to thehealseekers, a space dedicated to helping women explore metaphysics, psychology, and self-development as tools for clarity, purpose, and goal achievement. I hope you find inspiration here.