What makes one person extremely successful, while another will fail and give up vowing never to try again? Is it due to the fact that the successful one was more intelligent, more experienced, or possesses some sort of god given ability?
Probably not.
In the eyes of society, history tells us that successful individuals triumphed in what they did simply because they failed and never surrendered their passion. They would take failure as being part of the equation if they wanted to achieve success beyond their wildest dreams.
Over the past decade, interviews and research have been conducted to determine whether there was a commonality between some of the greatest people in history. Specifically, it was the pursuit of the so-called “magic formula” that led to this research.
Ultimately, it was concluded that every single person’s success, had to endure some sort of failure in the past. Whether it was emotionally, physically or mentally, they had to overcome at least an obstacle before they could experience success.
Now, the great news is that, success almost always occurs even if you failed 1000 or 100,000 times in your life, as long as you never surrender, the reason being that success is not an absolute destination but is rather a journey.
The biggest problem with failure is that it is a subject that most people hate to talk about. It’s through dealing with failure that we can ultimately gain success. So why isn’t everybody dealing and learning from their failures?
What we are talking about here is the FEAR of FAILURE.
Its humanity’s greatest nemesis and the killer of dreams that bring you success. It is in our innate nature since the dawn of man to feel fear. Fear of actions that could complicate situations which may be life threatening or in this case, fear of being ridiculed for pursuing our dreams and passion. Fear of failure is our natural instinct that separates us from what we want to achieve in life. It scares every dream and passion that you may have.
What you must actually instill in your mindset is that failure is our greatest mentor and that it teaches you what nobody else can. To achieve success, you must first avoid the fear of a possibility of failing to cloud your judgement and to strangle your decision.
As you fail, you puncture a hole deep within your ego, and only then will you begin to learn the important things you couldn’t see before. If you can learn to take failure and never accept defeat, you would inadvertently take up the challenge to fight back even stronger, because of this simple shift in mindset, failure can remedy wonders for people to begin again, this time intelligently.
If you are not convinced. Lessons of failure can be seen in almost every success story in the world. Just like this guy, Charles Forman who is the founder of OMGPOP who created the hit sensation; “Draw Something“.
Charles Forman had just $1,700 in his bank account the day before he launched “Draw Something“, since then it has been downloaded over 35 million times and was later sold to Zynga for $180 million. So you would ask how he created a one hit wonder in such a short period of time? No, he actually started his game development company 6 years ago and created dozens of games prior to “Draw something“. It was because he never gave up to dozens of failure, that he continued to create better games that led to this magnificent one.
Another inspiring story of a teenage entrepreneur who finally succeeded after failing over 30 times in his previous web ventures was Adam Horwitz. At the age of just 15, he had the dream of making a million dollars with an entrepreneurial idea that would revolutionize the mobile marketing industry.
After 3 years of unsuccessful self-funded ventures, Adam Horwitz finally launched his first successful product, YepText that led to a series of impactful creations that finally propelled him to the million dollar mark at the age of 18. Eventually he was featured on CNN for being the top 8 kid entrepreneurs to watch for 2012 and beyond. All this manifested only after he took those early failures as a legitimate step towards the right direction.
Simply by acknowledging that failure is part of the process in your search for success can be a great stepping stone. When you can stare adversity in the face, you will no doubt have the strength inside of you to achieve anything you set out to achieve.
Article By Joel Brown
Great article, thanks Joel.
I like the way you’ve incorporated success stories in there. Too many people just see the huge success in the media and give them a false sense of hope that the first time always works. I’d prefer to hear of their struggle and their overcoming of their failures- this would be much more beneficial to people and manage their expectations.
Hi, this is a great article but there’s one sentence that really confuses me.
“To achieve success, you must first avoid the fear of a possibility of failing to cloud your judgement and strangle your decision.”
Grammatically, this sentence means that to achieve success you must avoid the fear of failing so you will cloud your judgement and strangle your decision… I highly suggest rewording it.
Cheers.
Really encouraging one, appreciate it.
Thx for article I realy lv it, means a lot to me