One of the secrets to success is the ability to hold on a little longer than the next guy. To be willing to take a little more rejection, a little more hardship, and a little more temporary failure over time.
Ultimately, to be successful you have to know how to survive setbacks and failure. In the end, failure is not fatal. Lying there and wallowing in it is fatal, but getting up and accepting it as a temporary setback forges a new beginning. Failure can sometimes feel fatal, but it never is.
In my sales career I have had far more “no’s” than “yes’s”; the “no’s” out number the “yes’s” twenty or thirty to one. If I had focused on the twenty or thirty “no’s” instead of the one “yes” I would have quit. Too often we focus on the wrong thing. We fixate on the “no” rather than anticipate the “yes”. We must position ourselves with people to give them every opportunity to say “yes” to us. We have to ask and ask and then ask again, so we gain the “yes” we want. We have to be willing to attend and graduate the “University of Failure” to eventually receive our doctorate in success. No one has ever achieved long lasting success without the “University of Failure” degree. We don’t begin as a success.
Let me give you a few rules of failure. Learning and applying these will better prepare you for your success.
Temporary failures are not bad: If we mentally focus on bad events, that is what we will create more of. In the end, failure is neither good nor bad. When Thomas Edison’s wonderful compound of laboratories and buildings burnt to the ground he did two things. First he told his sons to get his wife because she would never see another fire like this in her lifetime. Second, he realized that all his failures had been burned away. He had a clean slate in front of him.
At the end of the day, week, month, or year it’s what you do with the set back that makes it good or bad. Failure is merely a lesson.
To take advantage of a lesson, you must fully learn it. That means that we must review and analyze all the failures and setbacks we experience. Most of us want to merely forget them or cover them up. This puts us in a pattern to repeat them again. Treat each failure as a lesson. In school if you don’t learn your lesson you don’t graduate. Make sure you learn the lessons that failure is trying to teach you.
Treat each failure as a lesson bringing you closer to success. By learning how not to do something, you are exponentially closer to learning how to do it.
In the end, failure is never final. We all fail and fall down. We all come up short of the mark in life. It’s whether we decide to stay there or learn and move forward that makes us a success. Tackle the opportunity that your setbacks and failures bring you everyday. Create a daily mindset of opportunity in each setback. Your choice is to either stay down or get up. Champions get up each and every day.
