1. Failure makes you strong.
The most obvious and most talked about blessing of failure is strength. It’s important enough to bear repeating: The damage done to muscles by weight lifting makes those muscles grow denser. In the same way, the psychic wound we experience when we fail, while painful, can build the stamina and endurance we need to get through the long haul.
2. Failure gives you confidence. We generally think of success as building confidence. Getting that acceptance or good review is what creates positive feelings about ourselves, right?
But confidence resulting from success or praise is weak, false, and fleeting because it is dependent on external sources. Say you get a story published in a top-notch magazine. You feel great. Here, finally, is the acknowledgement you’ve been looking for. You experience the luscious joy of telling your jealous friends about your success.
But what happens when the next story is turned down, and the one after that? How do you feel when that envious friend wins an award? If your self-esteem comes from outside yourself, it will immediately evaporate with the first stumble.
Failure builds something much more stable and longer lasting. Once you’ve survived failure—once you’ve gotten through the initial upset, picked yourself up, and kept going—you realize something utterly essential: That nothing can stop you. That you are a writer no matter what. That is true confidence.
3. Failure clarifies mistakes and misdirection.
Remember the old saw, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”? The notion that we should keep trying no matter what is so deeply embedded in our culture, that it’s hard to imagine there might be a better approach. But sometimes, instead of trying again, we need to stop what we’re doing, and figure out if we’re going in the wrong direction.
Am I saying that you should sometimes give up after a serious failure? If “giving up” means stopping to try something different, then yes.
One of the powerful lessons of failure is that you may not be on the right track. Maybe that novel isn’t getting published because it doesn’t showcase your true talents. Perhaps you aren’t a novelist after all: Maybe you’re a poet. Perhaps you should be focusing on writing short stories, rather than the blog that no one reads. Maybe it will be a delicately written memoir that makes you famous, rather than the John le Carre-style thriller you’re struggling with.
If you’re experiencing repeated failure, it could be a signal. Assess what you’re doing. That assessment may lead to a recommitment to your current work, but it also may result in a sea change—one that creates all sorts of new possibilities.