By: Megat Harris Iskandar
“Success
is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
- Sir
Winston Churchill
I know that it
is easier said than done. But look, the reality is if you make decisions and
try different things, there is always a chance of failure. You might decide you
are going to start a business and guess what? It does not work. You might
decide to host a new podcast or write a book, and it bombs. Nobody pays
attention.
Well unfortunately, for most people
who try something and fail, that failure reinforces their feelings of regret.
They think, I never should have done this. Why did I even try this? How stupid
can I be? It reinforces their insecurities and fears. They return to a rut.
They get negative. They might never try anything again.
I think the biggest obstacle to
success for most people is they never do anything. They just exist and go
through life and never take a chance or do anything different. They go from one
day to the next and just exist in life because they have failed in the past and
are afraid to try again, or because they are too scared to take a chance in the
first place.
The most successful people in the
world are only successful after so many failures; you wonder how they ever kept
going. If you really study their failures, you think, how could they survive
that?
When you look at Abraham Lincoln’s
life up to the point when he became president of the United States, there’s a
long list of failures. There are successes on that list, too, but the failures
are a large part of his story. They played a major role in making him the man
he was, the leader he was.
Ulysses S. Grant, who won the Civil
War, failed at much of his life up until he became the general who won the war.
He was a failed real estate agent, farmer and soldier. He worked a menial job
in his father’s leather tanning shop. This was not the picture of a national
hero, OK? But when he won the war, everybody started thinking of him as a
success. What if he had just given up in that leather shop? What if he had believed
what all the neighbours were saying about him—that he was a hopeless failure
and he should just settle for that menial job working for his father? Where
would we be now?
They both live in the past. You must
be future-focused. You must be forward-focused. You must think, it is another
day and I am getting up and I am getting after it and the best way to deal with
failure is to focus on what is next. Move forward, chart a new path and get
excited about what is next.
Two of the great emotions in life are
excitement or enthusiasm. It is easy to get down, where your attitude is that
nothing’s working and life is terrible. Keep your excitement and enthusiasm
about the future and about where you are going, how do you do that? Talk about
that next thing. Write it out. Share it with people who can help you get
excited. Post it on your mirror every day if that is your thing. But make sure
you place your thoughts on the next goal, the next journey, and stop rehashing
that last failure in your mind.
You have control of your thoughts.
Whether you’ve had a great success or you’ve had a great failure, you need to
focus those thoughts on what’s next, on what the future has in store for you.
And to drive toward that instead of staring backward at what happened.
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