Why Success Always Starts With Failure By Sarah Rapp

If there is one thing that we all have in common with each other, it is the fear of failures. Throughout our lives we keep experimenting with new things, sometimes willingly and sometimes not. It can be something as small as starting a new hobby or something as big as moving countries, however in both these situations we will only be content if we get positive outcomes. We will only be satisfied if we get that hobby down on the first try, or if we make friends on the very first day in the new country. What we don’t realise is that a life without failures is not a life well lived, but rather uneventful.

According to the article “Why success always starts with failure” by Sarah Rapp, our egos are our own worst enemies when it comes to failures. She also talks about three very common reactions we tend to showcase when dealing with failures; denial, chasing your losses and hedonic editing. I think we can all relate to this. How many times have you tried to downplay your mistakes by denying them, or simply by making even more risky moves and ending up with more failures than you started with? Many. Hedonic editing is another way of minimizing our failures. It is when we try to cover our mistakes with our other - often unrelated – successes or by reshaping the failure to make it seem like a success. All very poor but common attempts we often make so as to not be held accountable for our failures.

Some of them are;

• Recognising your failures: Rapp states that the first step to transform your failure in your success is to actually recognise it as such. A failure. We often use Hedonic editing, as mentioned above, to cover our failures with various excuses. This does nothing but inhibit our learning and