Failure is a bad thing. That’s how we are conditioned from very early on. And so we take all the challenges in our life with an extra effort to avoid failure.

Highly effective entrepreneurs have a different approach to failure. Instead of warding off failure, they include it in their everyday life to benefit from it. They use the learnings from their defeats to find their sweet spot.

Extremely successful people make a difference between being a failure or having failures along your way to success. They don’t want you to be a failure, they want you to have failures.

Here are 6 reasons why successful people want you to have failures:

1. The “license to fail” boosts your actions

Fear of failure is always an action killer. Instead of taking massive action, we sit and ponder what strategy is best to avoid failures. A “permission to fail” stops that unfruitful paralysis. Our mind switches into “free trial” mode. If it’s okay or even helpful to fail, why wait any longer to try things out!

Your execution level will drastically increase while your focus shifts from (pessimistic) problem-avoiding to (optimistic) solutions-finding. This also triggers your innovative potential a lot.

A great example for what a positive attitude towards failure can result in, are the highly successful innovators you find in Silicon Valley. Instead of fearing failures, they collect them as trophies.

“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.” – George Edward Woodberry

2. Your willingness to take risks will grow

Practicing to fail grows your trust in the learnings you can carry away from each defeat. You not only take more action, you take more courageous action.Our comfort zones are often the limiting factor to the growth and momentum of our businesses.

A courageous mind helps you leave your comfort zone and act outside of it. That’s when things you thought were impossible for you to do, start to appear doable and less daunting.

3. You train your staying power

It’s sad but true – most ambitious entrepreneurs are drawn into a vicious cycle that makes them give up before they even really started. They obsessively count the bad sides of their setbacks, which slowly eats their self-esteem (and focused actions), leading them to surrender far too early. Accepting and practicing failure breaks that a catch-22.

Knowing that failing is a “default” component of building a successful business, is a total game changer. If a non-success hits you, you get up quickly to apply its learnings to reach the next level of the business-building-game you love to play.

Your inner counter detects the wins, not the losses of your failures. And even if you already have lots of defeats in your backpack, you don’t feel their burden because you know the next failure is just one more step towards your goal.

4. Your actions become more fruitful

Without the fear of failure breathing down your neck, you have much better focus in your actions. You spend less time dilly-dallying over too many options. And your tendency to get bogged down in details decreases.

Impediments like procrastination and your ongoing search for distractions lose dominance in your working days. There’s no reason for you to run from facing potential obstacles any longer.

Over time, massive compound effects of all the learnings you collect show up. And you can only become smarter and more effective with every further step that you do.

5. You gain traction faster

Speaking of compound effects – let’s summarize the advantages of dealing with failure in a proactive, constructive way:

• instead of hesitating with actions, you boost your action taking
• instead of avoiding risks, you act courageously outside your comfort zone
• instead of giving up far too early, you take failures as stepping stones to your final goals
• instead of poor results (coming from being occupied by fear of failure), you collect great accomplishments from your highly focused, confident actions

All this leveling up sums up in another major benefit; You gain traction much faster. Yes, it’s like putting unstoppable momentum in motion, which has huge potential to not only affect your business, as you can see in the next and final point!

“Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.” – Denis Waitley

6. You live your full potential

Highly successful people don’t take failure as a temporary evil they have to accept it for the limited time of building something. Instead, they make failure – and especially the improvements they gain from it an integral, permanent part of their lifestyle.

Yes, these icons of success aim for improvements in all areas of their lives. They take the risk of failing, to lift their business, their mindset, their health, their relationships and their family life.

Have you ever wondered why successful people love to tweak their habits? They fine tune their traits as plain as it sounds, to become the best version they can be. That’s why so many success celebs are bursting with mental strength and physical energy.

Fear of failure, the daily grind, low self-esteem and several other things keep most of us from reaching our full potential. Don’t let that be you. Start collecting your failure trophies today so you can build success and live a happier life!

How has failure helped you succeed? Share your thoughts below!

Image courtesy of Twenty20.com