Outstanding Club

Today’s Misdirectional Compass Point:

Succeeding Every Time is Critical

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.” – George Bernard Shaw

Whether you will fail at some point in your life is not in question – you absolutely will, and for your sake I hope it happens often. We all love the feeling of succeeding at something, but too often we overlook the wonderful opportunity that our ability to truly, embarrassingly, and utterly fail at something.

In Dan Pink’s book “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko”, the fifth rule that Johnny learns on his career guidance path is to “make excellent mistakes”. Note the key word here – “excellent”. Failing because you just didn’t even try is foolishness, and there is little to be learned from such mistakes except to actually try next time. Assuming you actually tried to do something, and then failed – even when you gave it everything you felt you had in you at the time to give – the growth you can experience from such an experience is immense.

Practice Makes Greatness

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

That little green Muppet Yoda said it best, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” If you want to really excel at something, you have to start by simply doing it at all. In most cases, being great at whatever you want to do requires doing it a lot, over and over again. As you go through this process, you will very likely stumble upon a few things you do well right away, and you can certainly learn from those experiences. Think, however, about when you take an approach that clearly isn’t working – do you keep repeating the same approach until it somehow does work, or do you attempt to learn from what isn’t working, make modifications and tweaks to your method, and see where improvements happen and successes occur?

All this might seem to sound obvious, but I believe it is important to grasp that this is the same process as experiencing bigger failures in life. If you see them not as insurmountable setbacks, but simply as significant opportunities to learn how to achieve better results the next time around, then not only does failure become disarmed in terms of a negative emotional response, but we can perhaps even learn to embrace the failure for what it is – a huge opportunity to grow and ultimately succeed.

Automatic Doors

Imagine if you walked around through life assuming every door you came up to – at home, school, work, shopping, etc. – was an automatic door that would just open for you. Your nose would be in a permanent state of being bandaged from smacking into them! But more importantly, the only doors you would actually go through would be ones that people were willing to open for you.

In life, we use the phrase of “opening a door” for someone because we’re giving them an opportunity to experience what is on the other side. Sometimes you’ll find kind people who want to open a door for you because they hope you’ll succeed or find some benefit on the other side. But think about the places that tend to have doors that automatically open for you – most of them are trying to sell you something on the other side, and have only their best interest at heart! Yet so many of us let others open doors for us and hope they have our best interests at heart (possible but unlikely).

If you choose instead to open doors for yourself, you take control of your life. Your best interests are much more likely to be served, because you’re the one serving them! The opportunities available to you aren’t limited to what others would choose for you, but rather on your ability to identify them. Once you identify them, you can take a risk and see if you can turn those opportunities into vehicles that let you achieve your goals and dreams in life. And yes, absolutely, sometimes you’ll fail. But while failing, you’ll pick up experience, and you’ll learn what to do differently to make a success of whatever lies behind the next door you open.

More from This Site

• Outstanding Club » Change Equals Opportunity
• Outstanding Club » Personal Mission Statement – Naomi Judd
• Outstanding Club » Beginning to Catch
• Outstanding Club » Outstanding Links – April 21, 2008
• Outstanding Club » Sacrifice

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