Over the past year, I have been working to help a patient on whom I did revisional surgery from a prior doctor. Over this time, my patient has undergone one complication after another. First, it was nonunion of a fusion, then skin healing issues, then neuritis, then skin healing problems again. It seemed each time I fixed one issue, another would crop up. The heartbreaking part was that this patient was one of the nicest people I have ever met with a calm, patient, and pleasant demeanor, always working well with me and clearly trusting my judgment. I referred this patient to other physicians and investigated some unusual possible causes of the complications. Despite all this, the patient continued to be a challenge.

In short, I failed (at least so far).

It’s often hard to admit to ourselves, but failure is an integral part of life that is necessary to grow and improve. Think for a minute about how common failure actually is. Ty Cobb, the famous baseball player, holds the record for the highest batting average in history (.366). This means he got a hit 36.6% of the time when he was at bat. The other way to look at this is that the best batter in the history of baseball failed 66.4% of the time. He basically missed two out of every three at bats.

Here’s a telling quote from Michael Jordan, one of the best basketball players in history.

“I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions, I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

I think it’s fair to say that Michael Jordan is not a failure.

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“Failure is not only a common part of life, but it is also necessary.”

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We all fail at different times and to varying extents, but what matters most is how we deal with our failures. It is first necessary to realize from an overall philosophical standpoint that failure is not only a common part of life, but it is also necessary. Human beings learn more from their failures than they do from their successes. Take a child learning to speak, for example. Over the course of the many years of language acquisition, a child will make uncountable mistakes that are corrected by their elders until they learns to speak the native language with fluency.

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“We learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. Failure provides more opportunities for learning than does success.”

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Similarly, from a podiatric resident training standpoint, we focus in my residency a lot more on improvements to patient care than we do on what was done well. Although it is highly satisfying – and necessary – to focus on successes (you must know what correct looks like to create future improvement goals) there typically is not much to discuss. We consider what was done well for perspective and what made the result so successful, but after that, the educational content has been exhausted. Simply put, failure provides more opportunities for future learning.

How then can we approach failure-based learning from a positive standpoint? As someone who has failed many, many times during his life, here are my five best stepwise suggestions to thrive after failure.

Five Ways to Thrive After Failure

With an open mind and acceptance of failure each of us has the power to improve ourselves and the lives of others. To those of you who never fail, I wish you luck dealing with that inevitable event when it comes. To the rest of us, we’ll plod along failing, learning, and getting always better.