In today’s Blog, I want to talk about failure. I love this topic. In fact, it’s how I launched the book, The Dropout Multimillionaire.
Failure is the root of all success. So we start with this premise, right? The challenge is that people don’t really understand the point of failure. We hear it all the time I see it online, I see it in Instagram posts and I see it on Facebook. I see all these self-proclaimed gurus out there saying, fail, fail fail, the more you fail, the faster you fail, the faster you’re gonna get to your success. And literally every time I hear that I cringe, because failure is not, I repeat, it is not the secret to success. failure leads to failure.
Okay, I can hear you now…you’re sitting here saying hold on a minute, just a second ago, you said failure is the root of all success. That is a true statement…It’s the root of all success. But it’s not the failure that’s going to lead you to success. Here’s the key, it’s learning from the failure that is going to make the difference in your business and your life. Learning from failure is how you move forward, not just failing, I talk a lot about your personal filter in the book. Your personal filter is developed through successes and failures over time. If all you ever do is fail and you don’t learn, then failure is all you’ll ever know how to do.
Your job as a business person, or in any area that you want to get better at, is to do a post-failure analysis. Quite frankly, you should also do post success analysis. But in this case, do a post-failure analysis and figure out what you did wrong. If you can figure out what you did wrong, then the next time you start, you just don’t do that again. This is called learning from failure.
In the book, we talked about people who start businesses, or they are already in business. The key here is that everybody gets to start at a different level. I talk about this a lot. Some people start at zero, some people start at less than zero, and that was me. Some people started maybe positive 10 or positive 50. If you had the right parents and you had all the money you needed to start, if you had the right education and the right friends and the right mentors, you’re not starting at zero, you’re starting with a huge head start. A lot of us though, including me, started at negative 10. I had no money, I had no education, I got kicked out of high school, and I had nobody to help me. My parents didn’t give me money. I had no idea what I was doing. But I did it anyway. Unfortunately, where you start will determine the number of failures you need to go through and the amount of information and lessons you’re going to need to learn. So the key here is, what did you learn in each failure? I failed and failed..but if I had a superpower in business, it was that I learned from each one…. and I didn’t make that mistake again.
Learn from your failures. That is how you’re going to succeed. Don’t listen to people who just say fail, fail, fail. A couple of last points here….this is critical….If you don’t know what you did wrong, you need to go find somebody to tell you what you did wrong. You have to put your ego aside and listen to what these people are telling you. Just make sure to find somebody who has been successful in doing what it is that you want to do. Somebody that is five or 10 steps ahead of you. Find somebody willing to reach their hand down, to pull you up and ask them, “Hey, man, this was what I did. What did I do wrong?”
When you figure it out, the next time you start a business, don’t make that mistake again. It doesn’t mean you’re going to succeed the next time, you may fail again, for a completely different reason…. But at least you won’t make that mistake. If you fail again, learn from it, and don’t make that one again. Eventually, you will be what I like to call a “20-year overnight success.”
I struggled in business for 20 years before I finally hit it and made a lot of money. I was broke in my own business even though I was looking successful. You would have looked at me and thought…This guy’s doing well. No, I was broke. I was in debt up to my eyeballs. I was struggling day to day. I was working dark to dark and not seeing my family. That was not successful. But after 20 years of failing over and over and over and I finally learned a few things. That’s when it hit. Once it hits and you develop that personal success filter, that’s when you’re going to take off. That’s when your business will rock and roll. That’s when you’re going to make a lot of money. That’s how you succeed. Don’t buy the fail fail fail thing. It’s not the key. I like to call it graduating from FL-FL-FL-S University. Fail – learn – fail – learn – fail…..learn….SUCCEED!!
