What is the key to success?
Failure.
Yes, failure.
The one thing that all successful people have in common is that they have failed… a lot! Like a whole lot.
Michael Jordan puts it this way:
Success only comes from one thing: trying. You will never succeed more times than you try. You will usually not succeed as many times as you try. Those times that you don’t succeed could be called failures.
It’s simple math. To succeed more, you must try more, and the byproduct of that is failing more.
This is one of the places where traditional education lets us down the most. In traditional education, you are taught a thing, given a test on it, and that is your grade: pass or fail. That’s it. Move on to the next thing.
Fail the test? Guess you’re a loser. On to the next thing. Try not to suck so much next time.
When you look at a college transcript, nothing on it tells you how hard the courses were that you took or how you stretched out of your comfort zone. All that it has is that GPA.
I graduated cum laude by taking easy courses. My transcript looks great. I was totally unprepared for real life because I had learned to avoid failure.
Since then, I have learned that failure does not matter. Failure is the background. It is like white on a canvas. Success is all that matters. Success is the paint on the canvas.
Try and try and try. Only the successes make the score board.
The clock keeps running whether you try or you hide. If you try and fail, you learn. If you don’t try, you just lose.
Michael Whitehouse is a networking coach and motivational speaker. If you’d like to have a call with Michael to talk about ways that you can embrace more success in your life, click here to schedule a complementary session.
