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DR ICHAK ADIZES is a change guru. He has mastered the art of navigating the ups and downs that life brings us as individuals, families and organizations. Here he shares some simple ideas on the importance of failure and mistakes in the learning process.


Life is never smooth and free of troubles. Life is change, and change produces new challenges one needs to address. To address them, one needs to make decisions in situations of uncertainty, and the implementation of such decisions is risky.

Thus, change spells: problems.

So?

I, for one, have never heard of a person who overcame all problems without ever making a mistake. Even God admits to making mistakes by bringing on the flood; God admits to being powerless to make us all righteous, thus the flood was the wrong decision and God makes a covenant to never repeat that mistake again, and since God admits of being forgetful he brings the rainbow to remind him to stop the rain (Genesis 6:9-9:19). To me, God has such incredible human characteristics, so who is this human who is better than God and never makes a mistake? We consider mistakes to be failures because we assume our decisions should have succeeded in meeting our expectations.

Since life (change) produces a string of problems and their solutions are often mistakes, one can say life is full of failures.

Right?

Not so.

It depends on how you handle failures. If you brood, accuse and judge yourself for being a failure, then you are right. You are a failure. You failed yourself. You were the victim, the prosecutor, and the judge, all in one.

Real success depends on how successfully you handle your failures. Success is not how little you fall. It is how fast you get up. Getting up means that each problem, each failure, is an invitation to learn something you did not know before, thus your mistake.

The more you learn from mistakes, the wiser you become. The wiser you become, the fewer mistakes you will repeat. A fool who thinks he or she wise is the ignorant one; a wise person who thinks he or she is ignorant is the wise one. Thinking you are wise and thus there is nothing more to learn is what makes you an ignoramus. A person who admits that he or she is ignorant and is constantly learning is the wise person. And how do you really learn? By experience, and that means not being afraid to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them.

Just thinking,
Ichak Kalderon Adizes

https://www.ichakadizes.com/success-is-to-havesuccessful-failures/


Article by Dr. Ichak Adizes



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Dr. Ichak Adizes

Dr. Ichak Adizes

Dr. Ichak Adizes is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading management experts. He has received 21 honorary doctorates and is the author of 27 books that have been translated into 36 languages. Dr. Adizes is recognized by Leade... Read More

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