Redefine Failure and Learn to Truly Succeed
The month of September has past and now we begin October. If you read my post about a month ago, I talked about the lessons I learned from taking time to do some deep soul searching. I am glad to say those lessons have stuck with me and now with that momentum I am excited to finish off the year of 2016 hot and ready to make great things happen in 2017.
What I have learned here is that sometimes, we have to pass through major set backs in order to move forward. It seems needed that we take a step back and then we can take five to ten steps forward. I always think about moving a cart up hill or through terrible mud. You have retrace your steps a bit to have the power to continue forward. It has been in my failures the past few months that I have truly found success.
Sad thing is that we have become accustomed to the idea that success and failure are like an on/off switch. You are either a failure or successful. When in fact these two things are actually meant to coexist within the same circumstance and person.
Failure Is Just Another Step
We often associate “failure” with the definition, “unsuccessful in achieving ones goal.” When in reality failure is not a defining moment in us, but a definition implementation.
An illustration in this idea is the creation of the light bulb. Many times, people will say that Thomas Edison failed over 1,000 times to refine the light bulb. However, in Edison’s eyes it was not failure. He said to a reporter who asked him how it felt to fail 1,000 times, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." He also had said“I have not failed, I have just found 999 ways it doesn’t work.”
We take the example of Thomas Edison and realize that our “failures” are simply steps towards our goals not away from them. Astro Teller, from X (formally Google X) has said that his team celebrate failure. In the opening of his TED talk (click here to watch it) Astro explained to the audience:
We spend most of our time breaking things and trying to prove that we’re wrong. That’s it, that’s the secret. Run at all the hardest parts of the problem first. Get excited and cheer, “Hey! How are we going to kill our project today?”
Because of this attitude Astro and his team have been finding many solutions to some of the worlds greatest problems. Such as bring internet to poorer countries around the world with balloons. They were not trying to make this idea work, they were trying to make it fail. But in so doing they found something that works. I believe the amount of failures we have is congruent with how big our goals are. If you don’t fail then you are goals are not big enough.
True Success
Success means different things to different people. However, success to most people means reaching or obtaining something. With this definition of success, we fall back into the idea that if we don’t reach our goals then we are failures. Let’s then change our idea of success from a destination to a state of being.
You don’t have to obtain or do anything to be successful. You can chose to be successful right now. It starts with a change in attitude.We must have the mindset of being successful. Let me share with a few ways we can have a successful mindset.
- You believe you are successful now!
- You emulate the life of successful people.- Do what successful people do. Wake up early. Read a lot.
- You carry yourself confidently and with purpose.
These are just a few ways that you can develop the success mindset. However, don’t get caught up in all the details of what you must do to be successful. As Jim Rohn has said “Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.” This quote inspired me to the belief that I am not successful because I have money or status, but because I choose to be.
Conclusion
As we redefine our perceptions of success and failure it can become easy for us to hold both true in our lives. We don’t have wonder if we are a success or failure. We can look at our failures as the stepping stones and directions to becoming the person that holds that kind of responsibility. We can feel confident that who we are becoming is more important than what we are doing. Success is not the destination, but the journey.
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