February 6, 2012

Spectacular Failure!

To achieve business success we need to stay positive right?

Set goals, stay motivated, positive self-talk, and avoid procrastination…that's the formula for becoming a success in business and life.

Sounds about right…but here's the thing.

We are ALL programmed to avoid criticism, rejection, embarrassment and never be caught with our pants down (so to speak!)

In other words, to stay positive, we avoid the negative. Hmmmmm….

But what does that lead to?

Playing it safe, staying out of the fire and not taking any risks.

So, for most of us the natural behavior that develops from trying to think positive is to avoid risks and stop taking chances that may prevent us from feeling good about our plans.

Now just a cotton-pickin-minute…

Doesn't SUCCESS depend on learning from a series of FAILURES?

Are you getting the picture here?

One of the most significant lessons anyone can learn when trying to improve at business (or at life in general) is that we must expect (or even embrace) setbacks as a method of reaching the summit.

I'm not sure about you, but I must have fallen at LEAST a dozen times trying to learn how to ride a bike.

Now, I could have played it safe and never taken off the training wheels, but how would that look now…a 40'ish great looking man (this is MY blog after all) riding up to my buddy's house with a set of 8" training wheels hooked up to my mountain bike?

Not cool – right?

I was talking with a recent member of InfoMarketer'sZone over Skype last evening about how he transitioned from an accomplished marathon runner into writing and marketing ebooks online…guess what it came down to?

Spectacular Failure!

As someone who picked up running over a two-year period in his mid-20's he had learned that trying and failing was the way he learned to become a world-class runner.

Several times he had setbacks, emotionally and physically, that would have put many others on the sidelines, but his ability to stick with it and learn to overcome any issue he had gave him both an immense self-confidence AND a system for accomplishing anything he wanted in his life from that point forwad.

Put that way, it's not really that surprising he has taken the information from InfoMarketer'sZone and generated his own online self-publishing business from scratch – no previous experience with either writing or running a business.

The lesson then…prepare yourself emotionally to fail spectacularly.

This is something I learned very early on in my life, that if I worked on MYSELF to the degree that I had supreme confidence in my ability to succeed, overcome adversity, start from nothing if I had to and handle anything that came my way that would give me a HUGE advantage over my competition because how you act when you are not afraid is markedly different than how you act when you are afraid.

You've heard the expression, he lives with a "monkey on his back?"

That's exactly what living with a fear of failure is…learn to lose the monkey and you will soar to levels you never thought possible.

You can't expect to ever act or realize your true potential if you let fear or anxiety get in the way of what you truly know must be done. For some of us, we are lucky enough to learn this early on in life, others unfortunately only learn this in their twilight years or not at all.

What about you?

Are you truly willing to risk Spectacular Failure in order to achieve Extraordinary Success?