We benefit from people sharing their success stories with us. We want to know: How did it happen? What did they do? Could they predict the process in advance, or were there surprises?

We benefit from people sharing their failure stories with us. We want to know: How did it happen? What did they do? Could they predict the process in advance, or were there surprises?

I've been a student of success for a very long time. And along the way, I've come to grasp the vital importance of understanding failure as a crucial part of any worthwhile adventure. In this world, success is often hard to attain, and failure's easy to stumble into. But what's easy can teach us about what's hard. Rather than being embarrassed about failure, we need to acknowledge it, embrace it, and learn from it. It's the world's most common course for the growth and excellence we all aspire to achieve.

Christmas is, in principle, a holiday in which we Christians celebrate a great experiment, an adventure, really, that seemed to end, thirty-some years after the original Christmas day, in tragic failure. But in that apparent failure, were the seeds of ultimate success. We're told that God, the Source of All, transformed the terrible into the wonderful. And that's how it can go for us, as well.

Wise people have given us some advice about this. They've said: Fail often, fail well, fail forward. Avoid only those failures that would take you out of the game altogether. And, while this, in principle, is great advice, we often overestimate the damage that a certain failure would create, and we shy away from trying. We forget our inner resilience that sometimes only failure reveals.

So, today's advice is simple. Be the little ball that bounces high whenever it hits bottom hard.

Don't fear failure. Fear only a refusal to learn from it and transform it to the success whose seeds it contains.

Merry Christmas.