Failure: the new dance that’s sweeping the nation.
Everyone’s doing it. It’s easy to learn, and you can practice almost anywhere.
Fast Start conversation: Ah, failure. Happens to all of us; the reason pencils come with erasures.
Intelligent people fail.
Though there remains belief that intelligence is static, the feeling that what you are born with, you have. Neither is accurate.
Successful people fail.
Though an even more ill-informed belief is that intelligence determines success.
However, what intelligent people have studied is how successful people overcome unsuccessful moments. In success, it is not how you fail, but how you successfully recover, that matters.
The key is your reaction to failure stems from your attitude to learning, not your intelligence. In Flummoxed by Failure — or Focused?, posted in the Wall Street Journal, Ken Bain highlights how people’s attitudes help them recover from failure. Psychologists found people have two alternatives:
- Helpless mindset
- Mastery or growth mindset
Anyone can change their theory about intelligence, because as failures accumulate, changing your theory on how you recover provides a resilient perspective to your own potential.
Failure happens to everyone, though some lead you to believe otherwise. Test this theory on someone, ask them if their keyboard came with a delete button?