Failure is one of those things that no one wants to talk about, yet everyone wants to know about. I’ve been both a failure and a success for my whole life.
“I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot… and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
This quote is by someone that you will most likely recognize, yep the guy flying through the air on the right preparing to dunk….from the foul line! Michael Jordan was a huge failure in his life, 26 times he missed the game winning shots, yet he is still remembered for the shots that he made!
One common error we all make, which has serious consequences as we grow older, is the belief that failure is the opposite of success. Intellectually, we know better, but emotionally we often fail to act on what we know to be true when it comes to ourselves.
Watch children learn how to do anything
Think about the last time you saw a child learning how to walk, the child fails hundreds upon hundreds of times before succeeding. Get up, fall, get up, fall, get up, fall….it seems like a never ending cycle until at one point BAM he’s standing! Whoops, back down. That single little success is enough for the child to get up and try again, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t stand up and start walking at some point! He is bound, set and determined to walk just like his parents if not better.
One thing that I personally love to do is help kids with learning and playing sports. The reason I like working with kids is because they do not care about failing, if something doesn’t work, they will try something else until it does work.
As adults, we often give up after failing.
Why do we seem to try something and believe that because we aren’t good at it, we never will be? We all begin somewhere, that’s why there are different levels in everything we do. When I first learned how to skiboard I was in 7th grade in the ski-club at my school. I had gone skiing when I was really young but did not remember how to do it. I started off as a BEGINNER, you know where you BEGIN. However, I was going skiing with some of my friends and his brother and friends told us that we could go with them for the day.
What this means to me: going skiing with seniors my first time skiing in a long time = oh sh**. We started off on a Green Circle(easy slope) and I stood towards the back observing what the older kids were doing, trying to pick up where I needed to put my body and how to turn and stop. Okay, this wasn’t so bad…I’m starting to get it!
Next step….of course, we moved onto the Black Diamond, if you aren’t familiar with skiing, this is for the most advanced skiers. Now that I think about it, I was pretty stupid for going along with this, but I often do stupid things to learn things…don’t we all?
If you’ve ever gone skiing, you probably know what happens when someone who isn’t supposed to be on a slope goes onto the slope. Picture my face in the snow and a Santa Clause beard made out of snow… lesson learned!
I’m not an Expert Skier, maybe I should quit?
Hell no! I’m one of those stubborn people who makes things work, no matter what. You might be familiar with people like this. Henry Ford was very stubborn with developing the “en bloc” V-8 engine
Did I quit after getting a ton of snow in my face? Nope. I told my friend that he could go along with his brother and their friends to ski for a while and I’d meet up with them later on for lunch. My friend was great though, he told me that it was okay for me to not be that good because he’s been doing it for 3 years and decided that we’d go work on my form a little and he’d take a lesson with me. He understands the importance of finding an expert and learning from them and is going to be very successful when he’s finished with college.
To this day, I am grateful for my buddy Spencer helping me learn how to skiboard and now I’m a Black Diamond skiboarder!
I needed to fail first
If I would have succeeded right away, I don’t think that success would have meant as much to me as it did. The process of learning and applying what I learned really made me feel great about accomplishing this. I truly felt like I had done something!
Modern science is based on this same principle. Scientists know that an experiment is never truly a “failure”, it’s a lesson. It teaches us what not to do and pushes us to look for another approach until we find one that works.
Often times we just flat out give up
What normally happens to adults when they begin an activity and can’t seem to get it to work the first time? An example of this is that I teach people to Juggle and when I teach adults, they are always telling me “I can’t do this….I’m too uncoordinated to do this….I don’t have good hand-eye coordination” all the typical negative self-talk of adults. However, with children, they usually say “I can do it…I’m getting it” things like that. This is the single most important thing that sets children apart from adults.
Learn like a child
Let’s face it, we’re all getting older and we’re supposed to be getting worse at doing things. I believe that this is BS. We can do anything that we set our minds too. As we get older, we learn more and should be able to understand that things take time to get good at, we understand that the best way to learn is by finding an expert and learning to be persistent. However, as we get older our bodies also won’t respond as they used to so we need to be aware of this. There are ways of improving this, including exercise and proper diet but our bodies still get older, there’s nothing we can do about that but accept it.
How does this relate to business, Chris?
The better question to be asking is “How does this not relate to business?”
Building a business or improving an existing business does not rely on our athletic ability, our hand-eye coordination or our ability to vertical jump 52 inches! Building a business is based on failing.
I have failed with over 9 businesses already, and I’m 21 years old (22 on December 3rd). None of these were major 5 or even 6 figure businesses but not all businesses will be 5 or 6 figure businesses.
A few businesses I have failed in are:
1) first remembered business of selling life savers out of my locker for 5cents got busted by the teacher
2) eBay business where I would sell random stuff around the house and sell stuff for friends parents when I was in my teens
3) Juggling Entertainer for birthday parties and festivals
4) Network Marketing
5) Cash gifting
6) Affiliate marketing for about 25 different products
7) Paid Surveys
8 ) Pay-per-click marketing
9) Adsense blogging
10) Blogging
There are probably a lot more that I just forgot about but there is just a little preview of what I have gone through and failed at…and I’m only 21 years old. I now successfully am building up a business teaching Internet Marketing to Offline Businesses, helping students brand themselves online to find employers, and am successfully blogging now.
By failing in these businesses, I learned what works and what doesn’t work. With the internet, we are allowed to read stories or blogs about people who have been where you are and are at where you want to be. This is a HUGE asset to us if we use it correctly because people have done it before and this shows you that you can do it too!
I’d like to leave you with a few words of advice…
Don’t be scared to fail, be scared of quitting. Quitters NEVER win and winners NEVER quit.