Teen Girl Guide - Dealing with Failure

That's right: Fail!

What? Being Smart means failing? Do I mean I am giving you permission to fail your tests at school? Am I saying you should give up?

Of course not! But I am saying that you need to accept that every now and then, you will make a mistake. You will try some­thing, and you will fail.

Fawn Germer interviewed women for her new book, Hard Won Wisdom. Oscar winners, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, the president of Switzerland—she talked to them all. Fawn found out that they all talked about the im­portance of failing once in a while. Here's her advice:

Be okay with failure. Failure is not a bad thing. If you aren't failing every once in a while, you aren't pushing yourself. You have to fail a little to find out your limits. And also to learn what you can do differently next time.

Say you're thinking about taking that Advanced Calc class be­cause it sounds intriguing, but you're scared you might bomb it. Say you're thinking of trying out for the school play, but what if you don't make it? Say you're thinking about submitting a poem to a magazine, but what if they reject you? Fawn says, go for it anyway!

Don't spend your entire life trying to avoid making mis­takes. Some teens will worry so much about making a mistake that they just don't try. They are so afraid to fail that they don't chal­lenge themselves. But a failure is not a measure of you as a person.

I learned from interviewing many successful women that they all failed at one time or another. But they saw it as a learning oppor­tunity. And when one thing didn't work out for them, another thing—sometimes a better opportunity—happened instead.

Move forward. Take what you learn and say, "What's next?" It's not about where you are going as much as it is that you are going!

Sometimes we fail because we don't try enough. That is a fail­ure, but it can also be a lesson for future endeavors. Sometimes we fail because we don't have what it takes to pull off a particular chal­lenge. But don't we get points for trying? Of course we do! And don't we get points for learning something about ourselves in the process? Absolutely!

So, fail sometimes. It's so much better than never even trying.