Everyone, and we mean everyone, experiences failure in life.

The difference is that most successful people have embrace and learned invaluable lessons from failure. Essentially, when they fail; when they embrace failure, they tend to learn lessons from the experience. They tend to grow and mature. They achieve new understandings and perspectives on life, love, business, money, investments, relationships, and people.

You can’t control the volatility of the stock market, market forces, the miserable weather or readers dismal response to your blog post. What you can control is your reaction to it.

We must learn how to embrace failure positively and understand that fearing failure only holds us back from realizing our full potential. By recognizing and accepting that everyone fails, we are better able to embrace failure as a regular part of life. For example, American President Lincoln and British Prime Minister Churchill both failed multiple attempts to get elected to public office until becoming President of the United States and Prime Minister of Great Britain, respectively. Thus, since most of what we learn is from trial and error, beginning when we fall down again and again trying to walk, it’s only natural to recognize that everyone fails … and often.

“Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.” William Rudolph

Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors in modern history, once said, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” While experimenting on the incandescent light bulb, Edison exclaimed to a reporter’s question, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Success typically comes after numerous failures. There’s something magical that happens when you don’t give up.

Failure can be an immense asset if we are trying to improve, grow, learn, or do something new. It’s the necessary feature that precedes nearly all successes. And, there’s nothing shameful about being wrong, about changing course. Each time it happens we have new options. Problems can become opportunities and new insights to solve old challenges. Deep down we know that our past failures have contributed immensely to our personal growth.

People fail in small ways all the time. To gain the benefits, we have to learned from the failure. The simple truth is – no great success was ever achieved without failure. It may be one seemily life changing failure. Or a series of failures. But, whether we like it or not, failure is a necessary stepping stone to reaching our ultimate goals and achieving our dreams.