Fail Your Way To Success: Why most people don’t

The number one reason people don’t succeed is simply because they fail to start (whatever it is). They become paralyzed by the fear of failing.  To be able to fail your way to success you first have to embrace failure as your best friend.  Realize it’s there to help you.  

Within Each Failure Lie The Seeds To Your Success

Have you ever watched a toddler learning to walk.  Take a step, fall, get up, another step or two, fall, get up, and the pattern repeats until one day the child is walking (and of course walking leads to running).  But there would be no walking, nor running without the falling.  Failure is how we learn, so you see it’s quite possible to fail your way to success.  

If you can fail your way to success like these folks did you’ll be in good company.

4 Keys to Fail Your Way To Success

1.  Fail Early

One of the most important keys to fail your way to success is to start trying early in life, your career, etc.  The sooner you start attempting success the sooner you’ll likely find it.  It’s also important to leave yourself enough time in life to enjoy your success.  Robert Kiyosaki says that it took him 3 attempts at business before failing his way to success with with the Rich Dad series.  But because he started early in life when success came in his 30’s he was left with plenty of time to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

2.  View Failure The Way Thomas Edison Did

Edison failed at the light bulb 10,000 times. When asked about is 9,999 failures he replied ‘I have not failed. I have just found 9,999 ways that do not work’.  Learn to view your failures as a stepping stone instead of an end in your path, and you will developed the correct mindset to fail your way to success.

3.  Fail Fast

Keep the time between failure and the next try short.  The faster you fail the sooner you’ll have success.  Only 1 out of 10 small business succeed, so be willing to start 10 with as little gap in between as possible.  It may not take 10 starts, perhaps you succeed on try #2, or #3.

4.  Fail Forward

Don’t make the same mistake twice.

Fail your way to success – Examples of famous people who did

1. Michael Jordan failed to make his high school basketball team on his first try, has lost more than 300 games (more than most NBA players have actually played), missed 26 game winning shots, missed more than 9,000 foul shouts.
2. Starbucks got their business model wrong the first time.  The original focus was on selling coffee beans to customers and teaching them how to grind the beans and make freshly brewed coffee at home. It wasn’t until the early 1980’s when Howard Shultz entered the picture that Starbucks began focusing not on selling coffee beans, but on making coffee, tea, and espresso drinks for customers inside the store.
3. Oprah Winfrey endured an abusive childhood, and was fired from her first television job because…she was unfit for TV (somebody is eating their words).
4. As a child Paul Orfalea thought to be dim witted, and placed in a special needs class…he later revolutionized the copy industry when he founded Kinkos.
5. John Mackey and Rene Lawson Hardy were forced to live in their store because they could not afford rent in the early days before founding WholeFoods.
6. Expelled from school, considered “mentally slow” by his teachers, and “sub-normal” by his own parents, and a laughing stock by many of his peers until he published the “The Theory of Special Relativity” – he’s Albert Einstein.
7. Considered weird Prince was booed off stages during his early years.  His true musical genius recognized by only a small tribe until 1999 hit record stores (remember those?).
8. Considered unfit to lead, and rude in 1985 Steve Jobs was booted out of the company he co-founded.  In 1996 he returned, in 1998 introduced the iMac and transformed Apple into the most successful technology company to date.