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What’s the Main Difference Between People Who Achieve and People Who Are Average?
Only one factor that separates those who consistently shine from those who don’t: The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
Soccer player Kyle Rote Jr. remarked, “There is no doubt in my mind that there are many ways to be a winner, but there is really only one way to be a loser and that is to fail and not look beyond the failure.”
Take a look at some of Maxwell’s previous attitudes toward failure, and see if your experience was similar:
- Maxwell feared failure. On the first day of class when he was a freshman, the professor walked into his history of civilization class and boldly declared, “Half of you in this room will not pass this class.”
- Maxwell misunderstood failure. Failure isn’t a percentage or a test. It’s not a single event. It’s a process.
- Maxwell was unprepared for failure. In Leadership Magazine, J. Wallace Hamilton states, “The increase of suicides, alcoholics, and even some forms of nervous breakdowns is evidence that many people are training for success when they should be training for failure. Failure is far more common than success; poverty is more prevalent than wealth; and disappointment more normal than arrival.” In life, the question is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with your problems. Are you going to fail forward or backward?
If the possibility of failure were erased, what would you attempt to achieve? There is no achievement without failure. To even imply that it might be possible gives people the wrong impression. So here’s a better question: If your perception of and response to failure were changed, what would you attempt to achieve?
Your First Step to Failing Forward: Realize There Is One Major Difference Between Average People and Achieving People
Get a New Definition of Failure and Success
The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views a mistake. —Nelson Boswell
One of the greatest problems people have with failure is that they are too quick to judge isolated situations in their lives and label them as failures. Instead, they need to keep the bigger picture in mind.
How should you judge failure? Let’s start by taking a look at seven things failure is not:
1. People Think Failure Is Avoidable—It’s Not
Everybody fails, errs, and makes mistakes. You’ve heard the saying “To err is human, to forgive divine.” Alexander Pope wrote that more than 250 years ago.
Here are 5 Rules for Being Human, which describes well the state we’re in as people:
Rule #1: You will learn lessons.
Rule #2: There are no mistakes—only lessons.
Rule #3: A lesson is repeated until it is learned.
Rule #4: If you don’t learn the easy lessons, they get harder. (Pain is one way the universe gets your attention.)
Rule #5: You’ll know you’ve learned a lesson when your actions change.
2. People Think Failure Is an Event—It’s Not
Success can be defined in these terms:
- Knowing your purpose in life
- Growing to reach your potential
- Sowing seeds that benefit others
3. People Think Failure Is Objective—It’s Not
You are the only person who can really label what you do a failure. According to Tulane University business professor Lisa Amos, the average for entrepreneurs is 3.8 failures before they finally make it in business.
4. People Think Failure Is the Enemy—It’s Not
Basketball Coach Rick Pitino states it even more strongly. “Failure is good,” he says. “It’s fertilizer. Everything I’ve learned about coaching I’ve learned from making mistakes.”
Herbert V. Brocknow believes, “The fellow who never makes a mistake takes his orders from one who does.”
Musicologist Eloise Ristad emphasizes that “when we give ourselves permission to fail, we at the same time give ourselves permission to excel.”
5. People Think Failure Is Irreversible—It’s Not.
There’s an old saying in Texas: “It doesn’t matter how much milk you spill as long as you don’t lose your cow.”
As Tom Peters acknowledges, “If silly things were not done, intelligent things would never happen.”
6. People Think Failure Is a Stigma—It’s Not
Late Senator Sam Ervin Jr., once remarked, “Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.”
7. People Think Failure Is Final—It’s Not
Consider the story of Sergio Zyman. He was the mastermind behind New Coke, something that marketing consultant Robert McMath sees as one of the greatest product failures of all time. The move was an abysmal failure that lasted seventy-nine days in 1985 and cost the company about $100 million. People hated New Coke. And it caused Zyman to leave the company.
Ultimately the return of Coca-Cola Classic made the company stronger. Zyman’s assessment was confirmed by Roberto Goizueta, the late chairman and chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company. He rehired Zyman at Coca-Cola in 1993. “Judge the results,” said Goizueta. “We get paid to produce results. We don’t get paid to be right.”
Every person’s life is filled with errors and negative experiences. But know this: Errors become mistakes when we perceive them and respond to them incorrectly. Mistakes become failures when we continually respond to them incorrectly.
Washington Irving once commented, “Great minds have purposes; others have wishes. Little minds are subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.”
Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. If we learn to embrace that new definition of failure, then we are free to start moving ahead—and failing forward.
Your Second Step to Failing Forward: Learn a New Definition of Failure
Remember, mistakes don’t define failure. They are merely the price of achievement on the success journey.
If You’ve Failed, Are You a Failure?
Tell yourself, “I’m not a failure. I failed at doing something.” There’s a big difference.
Artist Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings now set records for the sums they bring at auction, sold only one painting in his lifetime. Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in history, was considered unteachable as a youngster. And Albert Einstein, the greatest thinker of our time, was told by a Munich schoolmaster that he would “never amount to much.” All great achievers are given multiple reasons to believe they are failures. But in spite of that, they persevere.
You don’t make up nice things to say about others. Here’s the approach Maxwell uses to encourage and lead others: Value people. Praise effort. Reward performance.
SEVEN ABILITIES NEEDED TO FAIL FORWARD
1. Achievers Reject Rejection
Rather than say, “I am a failure,” they say, “I missed that one,” or “I made a mistake.”
2. Achievers See Failure As Temporary
3. Achievers See Failures As Isolated Incidents
When achievers fail, they see it as a momentary event, not a lifelong epidemic. It’s not personal. If you want to succeed, don’t let any single incident color your view of yourself.
4. Achievers Keep Expectations Realistic
5. Achievers Focus on Strengths
Bob Butera, former president of the New Jersey Devils hockey team, was asked what makes a winner. He answered, “What distinguishes winners from losers is that winners concentrate at all times on what they can do, not on what they can’t do. If a guy is a great shooter but not a great skater, we tell him to think only about the shot, the shot, the shot—never about some other guy outskating him. The idea is to remember your successes.”
6. Achievers Vary Approaches to Achievement
In The Psychology of Achievement, Brian Tracy writes about four millionaires who made their fortunes by age thirty-five. They were involved in an average of seventeen businesses before finding the one that took them to the top. They kept trying and changing until they found something that worked for them.
7. Achievers Bounce Back
Psychologist Simone Caruthers says, “Life is a series of outcomes. Sometimes the outcome is what you want. Great. Figure out what you did right. Sometimes the outcome is what you don’t want. Great. Figure out what you did so you don’t do it again.”
Your Third Step to Failing Forward: Remove the “You” from Failure
Don’t wait until you feel positive to move forward. Act your way into feeling good. That’s the only way to start thinking more positively about yourself.
You’re Too Old to Cry, but It Hurts Too Much to Laugh
Author J. I. Packer states, “A moment of conscious triumph makes one feel that after this nothing will really matter; a moment of realized disaster makes one feel that this is the end of everything. But neither feeling is realistic, for neither event is really what it is felt to be.”
The first important step in weathering failure is learning not to personalize it—making sure you know that your failure does not make you a failure.
FEAR OF FAILURE STOPS FORWARD PROGRESS
The inaction that results when people are stuck in the fear cycle takes on many forms. Here are the three most common ones:
1. Paralysis
For some people, fear of failure brings about absolute paralysis.
President Harry S. Truman offered this opinion: “The worst danger we face is the danger of being paralyzed by doubts and fears. This danger is brought on by those who abandon faith and sneer at hope. It is brought on by those who spread cynicism and distrust and try to blind us to the great chance to do good for all mankind.”
2. Procrastination
As President John F. Kennedy said, “There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”
3. Purposelessness
Tom Peters, coauthor of In Search of Excellence, emphasizes that there’s nothing more useless than someone who comes to the end of the day and congratulates himself, saying, “Well, I made it through the day without screwing up.”
A person in the fear cycle exhibits additional negative side effects:
- Self-pity—feeling sorry for himself or herself.
- Excuses.
- Misused energy. Constant fear divides the mind and causes a person to lose focus.
- Hopelessness. If allowed to run their course, continual fear and inaction rob a person of hope. And poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described the situation in this way: “The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone.”
As Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner says, “You’re more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.” So act!
GET MOVING, BUILD MOMENTUM, MAKE MISTAKES, MOVE ON
Playwright George Bernard Shaw asserted, “A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
Your Fourth Step to Failing Forward: Take Action and Reduce Your Fear
Find the Exit Off the Failure Freeway
The moment a question comes to your mind, see yourself mentally taking hold of it and disposing of it. In that moment is your choice made. Thus you learn to take the path to the right. Thus you learn to become the decider and not the vacillator. Thus you build character. —H. Van Anderson
The old saying is true: If you always do what you’ve always done, then you will always get what you’ve always gotten.
Many people on the failure freeway make mistakes but refuse to admit them. They see every obstacle or error as somebody else’s fault. And as a result, they generally respond in one or more of the following ways:
- Blow Up: People make a minor mistake and angrily overreact to it, taking out their frustration on themselves or others around them. Nineteenth-century English author Charles Buxton summed it up: “Bad temper is its own scourge. Few things are more bitter than to feel bitter. A man’s venom poisons himself more than his victim.”
- Cover Up: That tendency is as old as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—and it’s usually just as successful for us today as it was for them. H. Stanley Judd said, “Don’t waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It’s okay to fail. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing.”
- Speed Up: William Dean Singleton, co-owner of MediaNews Group Inc., addresses this tendency: “Too many people, when they make a mistake, just keep stubbornly plowing ahead and end up repeating the same mistakes.” Maxwell says, “I believe in the motto, ‘Try and try again.’ But the way I read it, it says, ‘Try, then stop and think. Then try again.’”
- Back Up: General Peyton C. March perceived, “Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly bigger man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.”
- Give Up: Personal growth expert Paul J. Meyer says, “Ninety percent of all those who fail are not actually defeated. They simply quit.”
BUT TO FAIL FORWARD, YOU’VE GOT TO WAKE UP
To leave the road of continual failure, a person must first utter the three most difficult words to say: “I was wrong.” He has to open his eyes, admit his mistakes, and accept complete responsibility for his current wrong actions and attitudes.
Every failure you experience is a fork in the road. It’s an opportunity to take the right action, learn from your mistakes, and begin again. Leadership expert Peter Drucker says, “The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes . . . otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.”
Mistakes are . . .
- Messages that give us feedback about life.
- Interruptions that should cause us to reflect and think.
- Signposts that direct us to the right path.
- Tests that push us toward greater maturity.
- Awakenings that keep us in the game mentally.
- Keys that we can use to unlock the next door of opportunity.
- Explorations that let us journey where we’ve never been before.
- Statements about our development and progress.
Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon and Schuster, declared, “Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility . . . In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility.”
YOUR MOST IMPORTANT ABILITY: RESPONSIBILITY
Stewart B. Johnson remarked, “Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves—to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today.”
As Sir Josiah Stamp said, “It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of our responsibilities.”
Your Fifth Step to Failing Forward: Change Your Response to Failure by Accepting Responsibility
Do You Mind Changing Your Mind?
No Matter What Happens to You, Failure Is an Inside Job
Life is not simply holding a good hand. Life is playing a poor hand well. —Danish Saying
Ultimately no matter whether the difficulty is self-created or comes from somewhere outside them, failure is created within them. It is always an inside job. It’s not what happens to me; it’s what happens in me. It’s not the size of the problem, but how I handle the problem. When I fall, keep getting up.
Many people desire to control the circumstances of their lives, but the truth is that we cannot determine what will come our way. We can’t control the hands we’re dealt, only how we play the cards.
South African general Jan Christiaan Smuts declared, “A man is not defeated by his opponents but by himself.”
You’re probably familiar with Murphy’s Law, which says, “If anything bad can happen, it will—and at the worst possible time.” And then there’s the Peter Principle, which says, “People always rise to the level of their incompetence.” (By the way, both were written by pessimists!) A similar saying is the law of human behavior: “Sooner or later we get just what we expect.”
The first element in winning the internal battle against failure is a positive outlook. University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin Seligman, who has studied employees in thirty different industries, observes, “The people who bounce back are optimists.”
How do you cultivate optimism? By learning the secret of contentment. If you can learn that, then no matter what happens to you, you can weather the storm and build on the good you find in any situation.
There are a lot of misconceptions about contentment. Let’s look at what it’s not:
- Not Containing Your Emotions
- Not Maintaining Your Current Situation
- Not Attaining Position, Power, or Possessions
Remember the words of John D. Rockefeller. When a journalist asked him how much wealth was enough, the millionaire, who was at the time one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, answered, “Just a little more.”
If you think positively and do nothing, you will not be able to fail forward. You must add positive action to a positive attitude.
Leadership expert Fred Smith says that the key to positive action is to know the difference between a problem and a fact of life. A problem is something that can be solved. A fact of life is something that must be accepted.
Your Sixth Step to Failing Forward: Don’t Let the Failure from Outside Get Inside You
Is the Past Holding Your Life Hostage?
Arnold Palmer once said, “That’s one of the wonderful things about golf. Your next shot can be as good or bad as your last one—but you’ll always get another chance.”
The same quality that makes a professional golfer effective enables any person to overcome failure and become a strong achiever: the ability to put past events behind him and move on.
The problems of people’s pasts impact them in one of two ways: They experience either a breakdown or a breakthrough. The following five characteristics are signs that people haven’t gotten over past difficulties:
- Comparison: Quentin Crisp once said: “Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.”
- Rationalization
- Isolation: Author C. S. Lewis asserted, “We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”
- Regret
- Bitterness: Wes Roberts, president of Life Enrichment, advises, “People do not have to remain victims of their pasts.” No matter what you’ve experienced, remember this: There are people who’ve had it better than you and done worse. And there are people who’ve had it worse than you and done better.
Your Seventh Step to Failing Forward: Say Good-bye to Yesterday
Who Is This Person Making These Mistakes?
Failure is the greatest opportunity I have to know who I really am. —John Killinger
If you could kick the person responsible for most of your troubles, you wouldn’t be able to sit down for weeks. Evangelist D. L. Moody was once asked which people gave him the most trouble. His response was, “I’ve had more trouble with Dwight L. Moody than any other man alive.” Television host Jack Paar echoed that same thought: “Looking back, my life seems like one long obstacle race, with me as its chief obstacle.”
Emerson said, “People are always getting ready to live but never living.”
Psychiatrist Rudolf Dreikurs, director of the Alfred Adler Institute of Chicago, observed, “We can change our whole life and the attitude of people around us simply by changing ourselves.”
When people are not working in areas of strength, they do poorly. Others are not self-aware and don’t even know what their strengths are. As Ben Franklin noted, “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.” Still, others hinder themselves.
Psychologist Sheldon Kopp says, “All of the significant battles are waged within the self.” That’s true. People wage the greatest battles against their own flaws and failures.
The character Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables declared, “It is nothing to die. It is an awful thing never to have lived.”
To have an opportunity to reach your potential, you must know who you are and face your flaws. Go through the following process:
- See Yourself Clearly: Bishop Fulton Sheen offered this insight, “Most of us do not like to look inside ourselves for the same reason we don’t like to open a letter that has bad news.”
- Admit Your Flaws
- Discover Your Strengths Joyfully
- Build on Those Strengths Passionately: Recognize this: Not realizing what you want is a problem of knowledge. Not pursuing what you want is a problem of motivation. Not achieving what you want is a problem of persistence.
Your Eighth Step to Failing Forward: Change Yourself, and Your World Changes
Sam Peeples Jr. says, “The circumstances of life, the events of life, and the people around me in life do not make me the way I am, but reveal the way I am.”
Get Over Yourself—Everyone Else Has
Don’t get stuck inside your own ego, because it will become a prison in no time flat. —Barbara Ward
Some unsuccessful people tell themselves that as soon as they achieve considerable success or discover some unseen talent, they will turn their attention to making a difference in the lives of others. But I have news for them. Many people who struggle with chronic failure do so because they think of no one but themselves.
Did you hear about the guy who quit going to football games? Every time the team huddled up, he thought they were talking about him! If you continually focus all your energy and attention on yourself, here’s a message: Get over yourself—everyone else has.
STOP FOCUSING ON YOURSELF
First, you need to think about others rather than yourself.
Dr. Karl Menninger responded this way when someone asked, “What would you advise a person to do if he felt a nervous breakdown coming on?” Most people expected him to reply, “Consult a psychiatrist,” since that was his profession. To their astonishment, Menninger replied, “Lock up your house, go across the railway tracks, find someone in need, and do something to help that person.”
Kevin Myers points out that “most people are too insecure to give anything away.”
Most people who focus all their attention on themselves feel that they’re missing something in their lives, so they’re trying to get it back.
Developing a giving spirit, as Menninger implied, helps a person to overcome some feelings of deficiency in a positive and healthy way. That’s why Menninger believed that “generous people are rarely mentally ill people.” A person is less likely to focus on himself if he is trying to help someone else.
If you tend to take yourself too seriously, give yourself and everyone else around you a break. Recognize that laughter breeds resilience.
When people think about you, do they say to themselves, “My life is better because of that person,” or “My life is worse”?
How do you do that?
- Putting Others First in Your Thinking
- Finding Out What Others Need
- Meeting That Need with Excellence and Generosity
Be more concerned with what you can give rather than what you can get because giving truly is the highest level of living.
Your Ninth Step to Failing Forward: Get Over Yourself and Start Giving Yourself
Embracing Failure As a Friend
Grasp the Positive Benefits of Negative Experiences
A failure is a man who blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience. —Elbert Hubbard
It doesn’t matter whether your objectives are in the area of art, business, ministry, sports, or relationships. The only way you can get ahead is to fail early, fail often, and fail forward.
People naturally tend toward inertia. That’s why self-improvement is such a struggle.
To achieve your dreams, you must embrace adversity and make failure a regular part of your life. If you’re not failing, you’re probably not really moving forward.
Psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers asserts, “The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.”
Consider these reasons to embrace adversity and persevere through it:
1. Adversity Creates Resilience
2. Adversity Develops Maturity
Adversity can make you better if you don’t let it make you bitter. Why? Because it promotes wisdom and maturity.
Harvard business school professor John Kotter says, “I can imagine a group of executives 20 years ago discussing a candidate for a top job and saying, ‘This guy had a big failure when he was 32.’ Everyone else would say, ‘Yep, yep, that’s a bad sign.’ I can imagine that same group considering a candidate today and saying, ‘What worries me about this guy is that he’s never failed.’”
3. Adversity Pushes the Envelope of Accepted Performance
4. Adversity Provides Greater Opportunities
5. Adversity Prompts Innovation
The ability to innovate is at the heart of creativity—a vital component in success. University of Houston professor Jack Matson recognized that fact and developed a course that his students came to call “Failure 101.” In it, Matson assigns students to build mock-ups of products that no one would ever buy. His goal is to get students to equate failure with innovation instead of defeat.
6. Adversity Recaps Unexpected Benefits
Horace Walpole said that “in science, mistakes always precede the truth.”
7. Adversity Motivates
Your Tenth Step to Failing Forward: Find the Benefit in Every Bad Experience
Take a Risk—There’s No Other Way to Fail Forward
While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior. —Henry C. Link
Pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh emphasized that point: “What kind of man would live where there is no daring? I don’t believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished if we don’t take any chances at all.” Risk is a funny thing; it’s very subjective.
Risk must be evaluated not by the fear it generates in you or the probability of your success, but by the value of the goal.
The motto of all great achievers, “If at first you do succeed, try something harder.”
To achieve any worthy goal, you must take risks. Amelia Earhart believed that, and her advice when it came to risk was simple and direct: “Decide whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying.”
If you want to avoid all risk, then don’t do any of the following:
- Don’t ride in an automobile—they cause 20 percent of all fatal accidents.
- Don’t travel by air, rail, or water—16 percent of all accidents result from these activities.
- Don’t walk in the street—15 percent of all accidents occur there.
- Don’t stay at home—17 percent of all accidents happen there.
TRAPS THAT MAKE PEOPLE BACK AWAY FROM RISK
1. The Embarrassment Trap
2. The Rationalization Trap
As Ed’s Fifth Rule of Procrastination states, “Spend sufficient time confirming the need, and the need will disappear.”
3. The Unrealistic Expectation Trap
Consider this Latin proverb: “If there is no wind, row.” As you prepare to take a risk, don’t expect to get a favorable wind.
4. The Fairness Trap
When psychologist M. Scott Peck begins his book The Road Less Traveled with the words “Life is difficult” what he is getting at is life isn’t fair.
5. The Timing Trap
Jim Stovall advises, “Don’t wait for all the lights to be green before you leave the house.” If you wait for perfect timing, you’ll wait forever.
6. The Inspiration Trap
Someone once said, “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
If you are succeeding in everything you do, then you’re probably not pushing yourself hard enough. And that means you’re not taking enough risks.
Your Eleventh Step to Failing Forward: If at First You Do Succeed, Try Something Harder
The willingness to take greater risks is a major key to achieving success, and you may be surprised that it can solve two very different kinds of problems. First, if you’ve been hitting all the goals you set for yourself, then you need to increase your willingness to take chances. The road to the next level is always uphill, so you can’t coast there. Conversely, if you find yourself in a place where it seems that you don’t achieve many of your goals, you may be playing it too safe.
Make Failure Your Best Friend
The truth of the matter is that failure is either your friend or your enemy—and you are the one who chooses which it is.
Teachability is an attitude, a mind-set that says, “No matter how much I know (or think I know), I can learn from this situation.” That kind of thinking can help you turn adversity into advantage.
To turn losses into profits, ask the following questions every time you face adversity:
1. What Caused the Failure: the Situation, Someone Else, or Self?
2. Was What Happened Truly a Failure, or Did I Just Fall Short?
3. What Successes Are Contained in the Failure?
An old saying states, “The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.”
Warren Wiersbe says, “A realist is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been purified. A skeptic is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been burned.”
4. What Can I Learn from What Happened?
Poet Lord Byron was right when he stated, “Adversity is the first path to truth.” Restaurateur Wolfgang Puck says, “I learned more from the one restaurant that didn’t work than from all the ones that were successes.”
5. Am I Grateful for the Experience?
One way to maintain a teachable mind-set is to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. And that’s possible even in the face of a huge disappointment.
6. How Can I Turn This into a Success?
Author William Marston writes, “If there is any single factor that makes for success in living, it is the ability to draw dividends from defeat. Every success I know has been reached because the person was able to analyze defeat and actually profit from it in the next undertaking.”
7. Who Can Help Me with This Issue?
People say there are two kinds of learning: experience, which is gained from your own mistakes, and wisdom, which is learned from the mistakes of others. You should learn from the mistakes of others as much as possible.
Seek advice, but make sure it’s from someone who has successfully handled his failures.
8. Where Do I Go from Here?
In their book Everyone’s a Coach, Don Shula and Ken Blanchard state, “Learning is defined as a change in behavior. You haven’t learned a thing until you can take action and use it.”
Mark Twain’s comment was true: “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like and do what you’d rather not.”
Your Twelfth Step to Failing Forward: Learn from a Bad Experience and Make It a Good Experience
Increasing Your Odds for Success
Avoid the Top Ten Reasons People Fail
Lord, deliver me from the man who never makes a mistake, and also from the man who makes the same mistake twice. —Dr. William Mayo
THE TOP TEN WAYS PEOPLE GET IN THEIR OWN WAY
1. Poor People Skills
The Wall Street Journal printed an article on the reasons that executives fail. At the top of the list was a person’s inability to effectively relate to others.
2. A Negative Attitude
Your reaction to the circumstances of your life has everything to do with your well-being and your success.
3. A Bad Fit
Evaluate yourself and your situation. If there is a poor fit, think about making a change.
4. Lack of Focus
5. A Weak Commitment
The last time you failed, did you stop trying because you failed, or did you fail because you stopped trying? What was your level of commitment?
6. An Unwillingness to Change
Perhaps the most relentless enemy of achievement, personal growth, and success is inflexibility.
7. A Shortcut Mind-Set
Shortcuts never pay off in the long run. As Napoleon said, victory belongs to the most persevering.
Psychologist Joseph Mancusi noted, “Truly successful people have learned to do what does not come naturally. Real success lies in experiencing fear or aversion and acting in spite of it.”
8. Relying on Talent Alone
Adding a strong work ethic to talent is like pouring gasoline on a fire. It’s explosive!
9. A Response to Poor Information
General Douglas MacArthur asserted, “Expect only 5 percent of an intelligence report to be accurate. The trick of a good commander is to isolate the 5 percent.”
10. No Goals
Don Marquis perceives that “ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.” Joe L. Griffith believes, “A goal is nothing more than a dream with a time limit.”
Your Thirteenth Step to Failing Forward: Work on the Weakness That Weakens You
The Little Difference Between Failure and Success Makes a Big Difference
The quality that takes winners through failure after failure after failure is persistence. That is the little difference that makes a big difference when it comes to failing forward. The only way to fail forward and achieve your dreams is to cultivate tenacity and persistence.
Here’s a four-point plan for approaching achievement that will encourage stamina and resilience in the face of failures.
1. Purpose: Find One
2. Excuses: Eliminate Them
Agricultural scientist George Washington Carver noted, “Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.”
No matter how many opportunities you’ve missed or mistakes you’ve made, don’t ever make excuses. Bite the bullet, take complete responsibility for yourself, and keep trying.
3. Incentives: Develop Some
Walter Elliot said, “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races, one after another.” If you give yourself worthwhile incentives to win the short races, attaining a long-term goal seems less formidable.
4. Determination: Cultivate It
Author Napoleon Hill noted, “Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.”
Your Fourteenth Step to Failing Forward: Understand There’s Not Much Difference Between Failure and Success
It’s What You Do After You Get Back Up That Counts
McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc used to quote President Calvin Coolidge, who said, “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
Maybe you have developed the persistence and resilience to keep getting up when you get knocked down, but you’re getting weary of dragging yourself back onto your feet again and again without making any progress. You may be physically and emotionally exhausted. If so, you need to do more than just get back up. What you need is a plan that will help you determine what to do after you’ve gotten back up.
Recognize this: The goal shapes the plan. The plan shapes the action. The action achieves the results. The results bring success.
George Matthew Adams asserts, “In this life, we get only those things for which we hunt, for which we strive, and for which we are willing to sacrifice. It is better to aim for something you want—even though you miss it—than to get something that you didn’t aim to get, and which you don’t want! If we look long enough for what we want in life we are almost sure to find it, no matter what that objective may be.”
The saying is old (it was coined by Benjamin Franklin), but it’s true: “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.”
As the old English proverb states, “He who makes no mistakes never makes anything.”
There always comes a time when giving up is easier than standing up, when giving in looks more attractive than digging in. And in those moments, character may be the only thing you have to draw on to keep you going.
William Knudson joked, “Experience is knowing a lot of things you shouldn’t do.”
Personal finance author and lecturer Robert Kiyosaki acknowledges, “In my own life, I’ve noticed that winning usually follows losing.”
As sixty-seven-year-old Thomas Edison said as his laboratory burned to the ground, “Thank goodness all our mistakes were burned up. Now we can start again fresh.”
Your Fifteenth Step in Failing Forward: Get Up, Get Over It, Get Going
Now You’re Ready to Fail Forward
Failure is the hallmark of success. It can be the starting point of a new venture, such as when a baby learns to walk; it has to fall down a lot to learn the new skill. Failure is also the mark of a success you’ve worked for. When a pole-vaulter finally misses in competition, it shows how far he’s come. That failure becomes the starting point for his next effort, proving that failure is not final! —Dave Anderson
Now you know all the steps it takes to fail forward. Let’s review them again quickly:
- Realize there is one major difference between average people and achieving people.
- Learn a new definition of failure.
- Remove the “you” from failure.
- Take action and reduce your fear.
- Change your response to failure by accepting responsibility.
- Don’t let the failure from outside get inside you.
- Say good-bye to yesterday.
- Change yourself, and your world changes.
- Get over yourself and start giving yourself.
- Find the benefit in every bad experience.
- If at first you do succeed, try something harder.
- Learn from a bad experience and make it a good experience.
- Work on the weakness that weakens you.
- Understand there’s not much difference between failure and success.
- Get up, get over it, get going.
If you really want to achieve your dreams—not just daydream or talk about them—you’ve got to get out there and fail. Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward. Turn your mistakes into stepping-stones for success.
Keep dreaming, and keep failing forward.