If you’re like me, you’ve probably experienced some type of failure at least once in your lifetime. How did it make you feel? Just so you know, failure is a part of the learning and growing process of life but what is failure? According to www.betterup.com failure is a lack of success or the inability to meet an expectation. Not meeting a goal or expectation that was set is not usually a good feeling but we can learn to fail forward. What does that even mean? Failing forward can be defined as a learning opportunity when expectations or goals are not met which allows you to look for the lessons and the opportunities that exist in order to move forward stronger but this time, with experience. Wait, is there only way in which we can fail as human beings? Let’s find out by looking at the different types of failure.

Types of Failure

When it comes to failure, surprisingly there are different ways in which we can fail. Depending on where you get your information, you will see many different names or titles by which the different types of failures are known and the amount also varies. Here, we will look at four types of failure according to everydaypower.com. 

1. Abject failure is when people lose something that is very important to them like their health, right to an education, trust, a job, a relationship etc. This is a deep failure that many people struggle to get over.
2. Glorious failure is when you give something your all but end up failing in a big way which is oftentimes very devastating for some but necessary.
3. Common failure is the average every day type of failure that we experience over and over again like forgetting to do your homework or the dishes, birthdays and other common things.
4. Predicted failure is the one that we can see coming like clockwork because not every plan, task or goal that we set for ourselves and others will be achieved for different reasons. This is more closely related to experiments that we sometimes set up to see what the outcome will be.

Failure Is Our Friend

Yes, you read that correctly. If you have never failed at anything in life, how would you know what works and what doesn’t? Some lessons must be learnt as a result of failure so that we can look for the lessons, reflect on them, learn from them and use that experience to try again in order to be successful. However, this is not always an easy task and sometimes how we view failure is often one sided. Failure is our friend because it helps to remind us that no matter how successful we may get, there are still opportunities to learn, grow, build and share. Failure is a natural part of the journey to success. You cannot fail if you never try and if you never try you’ll never know how some things will turn out.