It doesn’t matter how often something succeeds if failure is more difficult than you can bear.
But if the best success often comes amid many failures, how can we cope?
You can work on being more resilient and deal with the pain and force yourself to bear it. That’s pretty awful, though. It also makes taking a chance the last thing you want to do. No matter how resilient you make yourself, you’ll still dread the risk-taking process.
I believe the answer is to become anti-fragile. The state of taking a failure or unexpected event and not absorbing the crushing weight of it, but rather using it in whatever big or little ways you can to strengthen yourself.
It’s very hard, however. We must disengage from our work and not take failure personally.
It’s an event that happens in life or business but it’s “over there” and it has happened so stand back, observe, and take what you can from it.
It’s so difficult to do, but it’s at the heart of even talking about success coming amid many failures. All that failure is OK because it’s leading to something greater. That’s a good extracted from it on a macro level.
Now it’s up to you (and me) to extract all the smaller personal and business lessons from each failure (or fear of future failure.