Why Failure is the key to Success

August 5, 2021 / , , / Blog

I made a decision to be comfortable with uncertainty over 15 years ago. I realised that when you’re comfortable with uncertainty, you become ok with going into a place where you don’t really know what’s going to happen. If you can learn to calm, centred and balanced in this place of confusion, you will always conquer life. When you find calm in this space you are more likely to follow your heart, you’re more likely to find the right route that works best for you because you’re not making rash decisions based on a knee-jerk responses.

In 2000, I was a Computer Science lecturer in the national university of Ireland, Galway. I also taught interactive multimedia – which is now called web design. I decided to give this up!

Maybe I was mad to give up on that ‘job for life’ but I didn’t feel it was serving me. I felt I wasn’t actually progressing! I left what would be seen as a very stable job to set up a business! I didn’t even have a plan at that stage but I set up a business working for myself. I became a freelance software developer that brought me on a decade of amazing adventures and journeys that changed my life, travelling to USA and across the UK and Europe, working alongside companies like Microsoft, NCR Corporation, IBM and working for really big corporations like Argos, American Stores, Fnac Paris, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange. I would never have done it if I hadn’t actually been okay with leaving what looked like a permanent job for a life of following my heart and doing something that I felt was really going to make a difference in the world.

I made a similar decision to embrace uncertainty in in 2010. This time I had an amazing career working in a large financial institute in the city of London working as a freelance contract making six figures a year and decided to leave this behind me. I walked away again and I embraced the uncertainty and moved to a sleepy little village in the north of Ireland called Portaferry. I taught yoga and meditation, I coaches corporate executives, I even fixed laptops, and created basic websites, and developed apps for small businesses, and worked with a slew of new start-ups and working the hours I wanted with people I enjoyed working with.

While I was making lots of money, I felt like I didn’t have any time to do the things I wanted to do. As a freelance contractor you need to clock the hours and even if you’re making $10k a month it doesn’t matter, you don’t actually have any time to enjoy the fruit of your labour. Life is short, what good is a pension if you don’t have the vitality and health to enjoy it. I was making good money working for other people, but wanted to find purpose.

Sometimes you have to let go of what you have to embrace what you want. Sometime, you have to be ok letting go of the good to achieve the great. Sometimes, you have to be ok with ending what have and do something you want and to do this you have to embrace uncertainty. Every single successful person will probably tell you the one thing that made them super successful. If you probe however, you will always find that they did 9 other things that weren’t successful before they got that one big success . If they didn’t taste new things, if they didn’t experiment and do these things differently they never would have got there in the first place.

The secret to life is not doing one thing right the first time and finding success. It happens but it’s rare. The real secret to life being ok with uncertainty, and learning from your experiences every single day. Success or Failure, always strive to learn something new that brings you to that place you want to be.

Embracing uncertainty is being okay with learning what you need to do to constantly improve what you’re doing and constantly getting closer to the life you truly want to life.

Remember, there is no failure, only feedback!

This articles is based on a live clips from Fresh Coffee Coaching, Episode 07 – Dealing With Uncertainty

Watch the full clip below on YouTube

Sponsored Post

This Post and the following Links are Sponsored by The Academy 4 Life Long Learning.

Clicking on these links supports this site at no additional costs to you.