In the midst of life, failure is inevitable for each individual.  Through my own experiences and observations I have found that failure is the most beneficial experience in order to become successful.  I am also not here to say that failure is easy or isn’t painful because it is. 

By failure, I specifically mean when a person gets to a point where they no longer recognize who they are. That they have failed in either a sense of progress, decisions, love, priorities or trust. 

J.K. Rowling made a graduation speech in 2008 for Harvard University talking about the benefits of failure.  Looking back to when she was 21, failure was what she feared most.  Once she hit rock bottom, she was able to strip away the inessentials and focus on what she truly wanted, not what everyone else wanted for her. 

She stated a person does not completely know their self until they have failed. Without failure, mistakes or regret, people would not have chances to grow and learn from the past to become stronger and wiser.  

“It is impossible to live without failing at something. Unless you’ve lived so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all,” said J.K. Rowling in her Harvard graduation speech. 

But why failure in particular is essential for success and self-discovery is that it gives you a blank foundation. A person has a chance to think about what it is they truly want, what they are passionate about and take it one step at a time to get there. 

Without this foundation, people are distracted by other’s opinions on what the individual should do or what society thinks is the most optimal option. None of that truly matters when it comes to the individual’s true happiness and success. 

The strongest people are those that fall on their face and have the ability to get back up, pick up the pieces, put them back together and come back stronger by learning from their failure.  

In the sense of businesses, 80 percent of them fail. The thought of failure scares people away and this statistic gives people less incentive if there is a chance of failure.  But the truth is no matter what the statistic is, there is always a chance to fail or lose, whether it’s in a sports game or the start of a business.

No one will ever know until they try. The point is if someone takes a leap of faith and falls flat on their face, they still had the courage to try. I don’t believe any person who achieved success had not failed numerous times beforehand. We are all human and there isn’t one person that gets it all right the first time around.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat Pray Love,” spoke on a TED Talk about her success and failures in her writing career.  For almost six years, all she had received were rejection letters on her writing where at times she struggled with motivation to keep trying.

But throughout that time she kept perspective that writing was her center of life and home.  Even now after her major success with “Eat Pray Love,” she has debated quitting her writing career just as she did before her big break. She had a fear that she would never be able to write something with such popularity as “Eat Pray Love” and leave her readers disappointed.  

What she realized was the way people experience great success and great failure. In both cases she found that either in complete despair or blinding fame, the person needs to come back to their center or find their home. The way she describes it,  a person’s home is what they love more than themselves, which for her is writing.  

The truth is, as I stated earlier, failure is inevitable. Failure is a part of life that each person experiences in some sort of way. The ones who come out successful have experienced failure and have battle scars, but are able to extract positivity from it.  

For the people who have never failed remain in their comfort zone and in the process fail to live.