Most people don’t like making mistakes or failing at anything. Highly successful people, however, actually crave them, according to an article by Belle Beth Cooper for Buffer.

People don’t readily admit failure

Cooper says most people are actually literally incapable of admitting that they’ve made a mistake or failed at anything. If people are quick to take credit for a success, they certainly aren’t as quick at owning up to failures. Even sadder is the fact that without the positive reinforcement that success brings, we typically become less generous and helpful to other people with our time, effort and even money.

Successful people and their positive attitude towards failure

After exploring what she calls the “science of failure”, Cooper then presents three highly successful people in her article, all of whom look at failure a little bit differently than most of us.

There’s Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong, who says she’s all for us realising how prone we are to making mistakes and learning how to learn from them; then there’s Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, who credits her positive attitude towards failure to her dad, whom she said encouraged her to actually fail; Even more astounding is Scott Adams’ view of failure. The creator of the wildly popular comic strip actually thinks of failure as a manageable resource!

In the world of business, online or otherwise, failures and mistakes are but expected. In the end, however, it’s how we take failures that actually matters. If we take failures badly and don’t even admit to making mistakes that led to the failure in the first place, then we are certainly going to be miserable moving forward. However, if we readily acknowledge our mistakes and look at failure in a more positive light, we can learn from them, and emerge out of those mistakes a much better person.

To read the full article, click here.