What’s your worst fear?
Spiders? Speaking in public? Being rushed to the hospital wearing yesterday’s underwear?
If you’re like most people, whether you admit it or not, it’s FAILURE.
And no group knows FAILURE quite like business owners, solo professionals, and entrepreneurs, right? We put ourselves out there time and time again, while friends and family members who work as employees, or are retired with a lifetime’s worth of opinions to share, voice their own fears and concerns to us at every available opportunity. Many take it one step further and chime in about their confusion – and yes, even their disapproval! – of our choices. Somehow, holiday dinners, well-attended family picnics, and other high-profile events strike these loquacious worrywarts and cynics as the perfect time and place to offer their two cents. Lucky us.
But really, when we FAIL, what happens? Does the sky fall? Do we lose our homes? Our shirts? Or worst of all – our pride? And if all these things happen and we’re still finding time to read this article, was the outcome really so devastating?
More often than not, FAILURE is nothing more than a shift in expectations. You thought you wanted one thing to happen – like, making 1000 sales in 24 hours from your latest product launch – but instead you get something else – like, a crashed website, and a bunch of emails complaining about poor customer service.
But…what if it’s not FAILURE? What if, like those old Reese’s candy commercials, all of the “your-chocolate-in-MY-peanut-butter!” moments are really birthing stations for HAPPY ACCIDENTS?
“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit,” said Napoleon Hill, founder of the Motivational Movement and best-selling author of Think and Grow Rich, in which 500 millionaires were mined and matrixed for their winning life formulas.
And Happy Accidents are definitely seeds of great might. They’re those well-disguised gifts that – if allowed to spawn rather than spurn – can easily become your own life’s (or the world’s!) Next Big Thing.
Penicillin was a Happy Accident, enduring more than 40 years of dismissals before it became “the discovery that changed modern medicine” in 1939. Heck, Columbus’s “New World” was a FAILURE, in that it didn’t reveal the coveted western passage to the Far East, as the notorious navigator had originally hoped to plot.
“Success is 99 percent failure,” said Soichiro Honda. Yup. His billion-dollar enterprise only came into being because Toyota wouldn’t buy his piston rings, and his other peculiar designs and patents were laughed at for decades. (Of course, when Japan’s post-WWII economy inspired Mr. Honda to slap a little engine on a bicycle – thereby inventing the Honda Motorcycle Company – Soichiro laughed all the way to the bank!)
Truth is, virtually every successful business person, author, artist, and accomplished human on the planet boasts a string of spectacular FAILURES that could trip a stampeding herd of juiced-up Paul Bunyans.
Which leads us to the Great Irony of Life: Failure is NOT a thing to be avoided, but rather, THE golden objective to pursue, accumulate, tally, gulp, and experience at every opportunity.
So here’s the magic key to creative freedom and fun, for all endeavors big and small. (Listen up! It’ll change your life…)
Ditch the pressure of “Success or bust!” and switch the goal to dogged failure.
Fail, fail, fail, and fail some more at something (or everything!) you LOVE to do, and sooner or later you are destined to succeed – whether or not you’re wearing clean underwear.
From one of Failure’s favorite protégé’s, please hear this:
May you always have the strength and courage
to FAIL MISERABLY at every opportunity,
and may you live on to become one
of the biggest failures the world has ever known!
(As for the state of your undies, for heaven’s sake – stack the deck in your favor. Keep ‘em clean – or go commando!)
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Lani & Allen Voivod, The Content Lovers of Epiphanies, Inc., help imperfect-preneurs, globals brands, and mission-driven organizations use social marketing & success strategies to ramp up visibility, competitive edge, community, and profits. Get their free Special Report, 37 Easy Ways to Boost Visibility, Revenue, and Results With Twitter, which reveals how to the leverage the power and potential of the world’s fastest growing social network.
