Treat failure as part of the path to success, learn from it as part of the process, and take appropriate action! If you do, we’ll be writing about you one day – Alex Dee
How to Look at Goals Hack and the Endless Fork Hack – Neil Strauss: With goals, what we think of as endpoints to a goal are really just forks in a road that is endlessly forking. In the big picture of our lives, we really don’t know whether a particular success or failure is actually helping or hurting us! So, the metric I use to judge my efforts and goals is this; “did I do my best, given who I was and what I knew at that particular time?” And, what can I learn from the Outcome that could make my best better the next time?
View failures as life lessons! The only reason we give ourselves a hard time is because we keep judging ourselves as if we’re perfect and that we don’t make mistakes!
Nothing is Failure, it’s all Feedback – Sam Ovens
I’ve Got a Lot of Work to Do Hack – Eddie Murphy: I remember one of the first times I was getting on stage and I was 17! I basically had a set where I was supposed to do the beginning, take a break, and then come back and do it again! I was gonna make 50 bucks for that. So, I go on stage and totally bombed, and the worst part is they didn’t have a dressing room to go back to! So, I had to sit with the same people that I just bomb with and then I would get back up again and do it again! The owner is like here is Eddie Murphy back again and everyone’s like oh crap that guy again. Lol! I’ll never forget going to the owners and saying great, can I get my $50 now? And he’s like get the hell out of my face! And, I was supposed to have that $50 so I could ride back to Brooklyn! Since I didn’t make any money my dad had to come pick me up at two in the morning and he was like, so, are you going to be a comedian? Comedian my ass! You better go back tomorrow and get a job and start at nine in the morning and get to real work! It was definitely a rough start, but really funny and what it taught me was I got a lot of work to do! And fortunately, I stuck with it and that comedy thing worked out! 😉
Build Failure into the Equation Hack – Vishen Lakhiani: When I set my goals, I literally build failure into the equations because I know, and I EXPECT I’m going to fail on my way to reach my goal. Google sets goals where they know they’re going to fail at 40% of their goals. That’s one of the smartest companies in the world. And if they’re expecting failure as part of the process, that’s going to work for me as well! Also, that 40% is usually your stretch goals, which is good. If all of our goals are realistic and we hit it 100%, and it’s easy with no failures, then that usually means I’m not setting the bar high enough. So set realistic goals and stretch goals and expect failure as part of the process, so you can prepare for it. Make it through it until you get to your goals!
Never Waste a Failure Hack – Tim Storey: When dealing with people who have had failures, one of the things is that they’ve been telling themselves a story for quite a while, so I don’t need to focus on the failure, as we constantly are making mistakes and it’s a part of it! But those big failures, they kind of stick with you. So, when I meet with them and I am coaching, I don’t talk about the failure. It confuses them because they think that’s all we are going to talk about is to overcome it! Instead, I focus on the state they were in when they made the choice that resulted in the failure, because I want to get to the root. What state was their soul in? Usually you’ll discover that if you’re in a state where you have peace of mind, you have a tendency not to make the same decisions you made, to make the same mistake. It normally comes from scarcity, or unhappiness, or performance stress. What we want to do is teach them how to spot it, so they will observe it next time, so they don’t waste the failure and make the same silly mistakes!
Winning as Percentage Hack – Jerry Seinfeld: Baseball and comedy is basically a life about failing, because you can fail seven out of 10 times and still be a killer baseball player. Same with comedy, you can kill your first few sets and just be absolutely horrible and still crushing it If I get some laughs. That’s why those are the absolute best actually, the best not at succeeding, but at willing to fail so you can fix it! So, even when it’s only three out of 10 times, they are still considered the best!
How to Process When You Keep Failing Over and Over Again – James Altucher: A guy who built several successful companies and failed over and over again. It lasted two or three years and had to start over from scratch and build it again, and during that period of time he contemplated suicide along with many other things!
I would make all this money and then say, “awesome I’m now done with having to do what it takes to be a good human and I can just do whatever it is that I want!” Lol!
Then things would crash and burn! Then I discovered that I really wasn’t that self-aware, and that money was not the goal, but it was the means to many other goals. When it crashed and burned it was extremely painful. I will take a deep breath and say UGH… How could this happen to me again? I mean not one-time, or twice, but third time! It would be so depressing, and I would say why? I think I’m smart… what am I doing wrong? So, I would analyze everything, and each time in my life I was at a different point. In the beginning I was single, and then I was married, and then I had kids. So, I start analyzing all of the things that I did well on the way up, the things I did wrong on the way down, and the question was should I just give up, or do I try again? And either option kind a got me depressed and if you get depressed all stress levels go up. There’s only two ways to resolve it! Number one you could just give up and blame others, and obviously that gets rid of all the stress! I even contemplated suicide and would look at the life insurance but there wasn’t a clean way to do it where my family would be taken care of! The other way to get through it is to say OK, well what went wrong and realize it’s going to take me another 2 to 3 to 5 years to get back to that level and be OK with that. For me there’s really only two ways to relieve stress and I decided to do it through persistence and learning the lessons. The alternative is giving up and that could mean giving up on your career or even contemplating suicide, which is what I did a lot of times, didn’t seem to make sense with how it would affect the other people in my life! So trucking through it seem to be the only way to relieve that stress, which was better than any other alternative!
Everything in Life is Working for Us for What’s to Come Hack – David Bayer: If we begin to view that everything in life is happening for us, not against us, then there’s no such thing as failure, only a setup of what’s to come. Stick with me because I know this is a little crazy, but the higher intelligence part of ourselves that does not come into the physical body is constantly guiding us. That part of us which you could call your authentic self or your higher self often times knows before we do precisely what we really want for now and in the future. It has this future oriented vision, it’s constantly setting up the plan for us to accomplish our ultimate goals, or ultimate vision, or ultimate dreams. Often times, we run into the set up as designed, again, to redirect us, to teach you something, but it’s often something quite significant and long-term and that’s at the moment, we can’t possibly see how it is working for us in our lives. I remember one point in time I had a significant crisis happen in my business, and nearly lost my entire business. Looking back on it, of course, as one of the best things that ever happened to me because it was a set up for what I needed five years down the road. Often times, we look at the set up as a breakdown and again, we miss all the opportunities. When you can get to a point that you truly realize and understand that life is always working for you, even when in the moment you might not have that insight, you can take the inspired action without the fear of what might go wrong, because in reality there is no such thing. Nothing can ever go wrong. There’s no such thing as a failure, it is just a setup of what’s to come!!
Go for Your Own Ideas Hack – John Travolta: What I would tell anybody is if you’re going to go ahead and try, go ahead and go for your own ideas. Because even if you fail, you can always say, “well at least I gave it a try, had a good time, and there’s nothing worse than playing a game on someone else’s chess table.” If you do, then you’re like “oh man how did I get to this point where I got influence to do something that doesn’t give me life, doesn’t give me joy!” Always go for your own ideas, even if you fail, and when you do the work, make it count! Don’t do the work for the fame or the glory or the recognition, but for the purest form of fulfillment, which is the work itself!
Improvement Stacking Hack – John Maxwell: When I said that experience is the best teacher, I didn’t realize that I was completely wrong! Because if that was the case, we would all be getting better as we age and there are a lot of people who get the experience, but they don’t get better! So, I realized that the answer was experience, along with evaluating those experiences is what makes you better. With my kids I asked them how their day was, and then I ask three questions! One – what did you do and Love? Always starts out with something positive. What did you learn? They can talk about that. The third question is, how are you going to improve the next time? I think it’s that last question that we’re missing that allows us to grow and learn from our mistakes versus repeating them over and over again. It’s a process of evaluating those mistakes and always taking a temperature of what messed up that will allow us to continually get better and better and improve from our failures.
Building Character Hack – John Maxwell: So I was mentoring the top CEO of a huge software company and one of my favorite questions to ask is if you had a chance to do a “do over” with some of your failures, what would you do over? One of the most insightful responses that I had heard made me question how I look at failure. He said I don’t think I would have any do overs because the mistakes that I made were still instrumental to the character of who I’ve become, and in my ability to go through that pain and overcome those adversities. I don’t believe I would’ve gotten the same lessons if I was successful without those trials! So, I would have to say I’ll skip the “do overs” and deal with that suffering and pain that’s built character, because I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be who I am today without those experiences. So, realize that the failures are what’s built your character and made you who you are!
How to Feel About Losing Hack – Maria Sharapova: Losing sets you up for Winning Hack – Losing makes you think in ways that victories can’t. You begin asking questions instead of feeling you have the answers. Questions open up the doors to so many possibilities. If a loss sets me up for these tough questions I might have to ask, then I will get the answers that will ultimately turn those losses into Victories!
The Difference Between Failing and Being Able to Succeed Hack – Alex Dee: The thing to remember is that failure and success are not on opposite sides of the road. In fact, you’ll be impressed to know that failure is almost always on the road to success, but I would say nearly all success stories have had failures! But here’s a magic formula on how to view failure for those who are able to overcome the failure and become a success.
Success = failure + learning a lesson + action! The only difference between those who fail and never come back and those who succeed are that those who fail get the learning lesson and then take action accordingly, which lead them on the path to success. If you look at every successful story, almost every single one of them have had some type of failure where you got the learning lesson where they were able to get ahead!