The Art of Failure

What makes the difference between ordinary and extraordinary, between average and excellent, mediocre and superb? Is it family background? Are achievers born into wealth? Is it better opportunities for certain people? Opportunity is a strange thing because two people with similar gifts, talents and resources can look at a situation and one person will see tremendous opportunity while the other is negative and skeptical. One man's junk is another man's jewel.

Opportunity is like beauty. It's in the eye of the beholder. Is achievement gained because of hardship or because of lack of hardship? Is it high morals or how about a great education? Perhaps here is the great secret. Well, I believe it is none of these items. The bottom line that separates those who achieve from those who don't is different perceptions and responses to what many people consider failure. Nothing else has such a dramatic impact on people's ability to achieve and to accomplish whatever they set out to accomplish. There are literally thousands of ways to become a winner and the sure way I know of to stay average is to fail and not investigate what you gained from the apparent failure. Through trial and error, I eventually taught myself how to view, what most people say is failure, differently. I taught myself that everything happens for a reason.

When a situation or a circumstance happens and it doesn't appear favorably for me at that moment, I have learned to detach, pull back, instead of over-reacting to the circumstances. By detaching, I'm talking about the thought process I now take now rather than the ones I used to take before. There are many situations you cannot change but you can definitely change how you view them, especially related to what most people perceive to be failure. I ask people all the time who say they've failed, I say, "Have you really? Did you really fail?" Then I ask them the next question "What did you gain, who did you meet, how did it develop character, what happened because of the situation?"