"Your biggest opportunities in life may come on the heels of your biggest failure.” You have probably heard this sort of conventional wisdom from a motivational speaker or in the latest business/self-help book. They will probably tout examples of great innovators who failed at something big before they were a success. Edison kept re-inventing the light bulb until he got it right. Sam Walton – the genius behind Walmart – failed with the first store he launched in Arkansas. Microsoft founder Bill Gates dropped out of college. Oddly enough, so did Apple founder, Steve Jobs. Gates lasted two years at Harvard. Jobs lasted six months at Reed College. It seems like a pattern: successful people get knocked off their feet somewhere along the way, but learn a lesson and get back up again. "So we should all fail so we can succeed,” says the motivational speaker.

The problem is, fail is a four letter word. I have a deep aversion to failure. Part of it is I am competitive enough that I don’t like losing. The other part of it is I don’t like the stigma. It is an embarrassment to admit that you have made a foolish decision that has cost you the success you were striving to achieve. This fear of failure is not just a problem I have, it is shared by humanity regardless of your particular demographic. It is what stymies people to steer clear of risk. We become cautious and guarded to make sure we don’t take a misstep. However, that fear of failure is also the thing that holds most of us back from reaching our potential. How will we know what we are capable of doing until we try? And how can we expect to get all of the answers right on our first attempt? We need a new perspective on failure.

One of the things I do is volunteer my time to teach football to middle school boys. I am a running backs coach. Running backs are typically the fastest and most athletically gifted players on our team. By the time they get to seventh or eighth grade, everyone knows who they are – their teammates, their parents and the running backs themselves. One of the things I commonly experience is these fast and athletic boys have never had to learn all of the skills of being a football player. I typically start the season with a talk about the three things a running back has to do to be a well-rounded player:  advance the ball successfully, carry out a fake, and block. You can imagine that these boys coming out of youth football have advanced the ball. They may know how to carryout a fake. But few of them know how to block. Why? Because on their previous teams, winning with one-dimensional players was more important to their coaches than losing and teaching the fundamentals of the game. So the fastest and most athletic players go through a frustrating time of re-adjusting their game in middle school. These fleet-footed boys learn to block or they don’t get playing time. And when they first learn to block, they fail more than they succeed. In fact, they don’t succeed until they are at a place where they see what they are doing wrong and adjust to it.

If we were to take a fresh look at failure and realize that it has value, we may not be so averse to it. We may even anticipate it and use it to keep us on track. As a child, my brother and I would play a game called Hot and Cold. You probably have played it as well. I would hide something in a room and then my brother, with his eyes closed, would try to find the hidden object. I would give him instructions by saying he was getting warmer or colder, based on where he was in relation to the object. If we were to look at failure as the "you are getting colder” statement, it would be invaluable in helping us identify what not to do. This only works if you are willing to do a couple of things. First, be open to risking yourself. If your fear of failure has paralyzed you, you will never move beyond your current situation. You will just remain stuck where you are. Second, you must be willing to change course. I meet a lot of strong willed business leaders. A good leader sets the course and stays focused on the goal. But a direction needs to be altered if you find that you are heading the wrong way. A good leader takes cues and makes adjustments. If you are going to grow, as an individual or as a business, you have to learn how to read and use failure to your advantage. It is what successful people do.

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Fail Like A Billionaire, by Steve Bertoni, Forbes.com, November 4, 2010