I
discussed the fear of success yesterday, but I think this topic is a bit more
familiar to most people. Unless you have
very high self confidence you have probably experienced fear of failure. As I’ve learned while studying successful
people, failure is nothing to fear. In
fact, failure is required in order to become successful. No successful person got where they are
without ever failing. A successful
person may not call it a failure; they may call it a learning experience or an
unwanted result because they know failure is part of the process. For example, Thomas Edison tried hundreds of
different materials for filaments while trying to perfect the electric light
bulb, but he didn’t consider them failures.
Instead he said he learned hundreds of different materials that will not
work as a filament.
Real Failure
The
only real failure is failing to try, or giving up. Edison did not give up until he found the
best material to use in his light bulb.
The Formula for Success
I
recently read an article in Forbes “The One Thing All Successful Entrepreneurs Have In Common...And What We All Can Learn From It”, which concluded that successful entrepreneurs follow roughly
the same process when starting a new venture.
- · First take a small step toward the goal
- · Pause and assess what worked and what did not
- · Correct, change, modify based on what they learned
- · Build on that and go on to the next step
- · Repeat
Notice that they didn’t stop when something didn’t
work (a failure) they made a change and tried again. Failure and learning from it is part of the
process that leads to success. Failure
is feedback on what you tried, if you don’t think of failure as being a
terminal condition you can learn from it and move on.
Today's Action Item: Study the formula for success. Apply it
to your plan, take a small step and don't consider it a failure if it doesn't
work the way you want it to. Learn from it and apply what you've learned
to the next approach you try.
No comments:
Post a Comment