....................................................................................................................................
Margie
Warrell
Once upon a time, a partially deaf 4-year-old boy
arrived home from school with a note from his teacher.
It read, “Your son Tommy is too stupid to
learn. We cannot have him at our school.”
His mother decided she would teach him herself.
Young Tommy might have been hard of hearing, but he was a
good student and grew up to be Thomas. Thomas Edison.
Yes, the man who forever changed how people lived and
communicated, and whose childhood bolstered his resilience to press on through the
thousands of failures that preceded the success of the electric light bulb.
He would later say, “Many of life’s
failures are people who gave up too soon.”
If you study history, you will find that the best success
stories have also been stories of pressing on through failure.
Too often though, we overlook the setbacks and only see
the end success.
We think the person got lucky. That they were in the
right place at the right time. That they were born with a genius we lack. That
they were destined for greatness.
But that’s all garbage. Although it might have included a
little bit of each, what ultimately led to their success was a refusal to allow setbacks and
failures to define them.
Take Walt Disney. As a budding cartoonist, young Walt
faced countless rejections from newspaper editors.
He “lacked natural talent,” they said.
One day a minister from a local church took pity on him
and hired him to draw some cartoons in a small rodent-infested shed behind the
church.
After seeing a mouse, he became inspired to draw it.
Mickey Mouse was born.
Even Oprah Winfrey, my
very own hero, had her fair share of setbacks, including being fired from one
of her first jobs as a television reporter, being told she was “unfit for
TV.”
Had she let the opinion of others define her or taken her
setbacks as a sign she could never break out from her humble beginnings, she
would not be one of the most influential women in the world today.
Of course, you might feel like you have little in common
with people who’ve risen to the heights of Oprah, Disney or Edison.
But that isn’t true. You do.
They were not born with some superhuman-like resilience
that shielded them from disappointment, self-doubt or misgivings.
They each had to wage their own inner battles with fear
of failure as they worked hard to overcome the external obstacles that lined
their path to success.
As Bill Marriott, chairman of Marriott
hotels, shared with me in a recent conversation,
“You don’t succeed by avoiding failure. You succeed by trying and making
mistakes and learning and starting over.”
What distinguishes these people is that they did not
become a victim to their failures.
When their efforts fell short, they pressed on.
When they fell down, they got back up. When people told
them they didn’t have what it takes, they found new doors to knock on.
They each intuitively knew that failure was an event, not
a person.
There are things that you and only you can do. Things
that will never be done if you do not do them.
But any worthwhile accomplishment is going to call on you
to trust in yourself more fully, to risk mistakes and reframe your failures as
par the course of what it takes you to succeed.
Most of all, it will take stepping out of your comfort
zone again and again, no matter how loud that little voice of doubt is
screaming in your head to play it safe, turn back or give up.
How you choose to interpret your failures will either
move you forward in life or hold you back.
Every failure can be turned into a steppingstone to
success.
Every mistake is a lesson in what not to do. Every
setback is an opportunity to dig deeper into yourself, to access resources you
didn’t know you had and to acquire wisdom you could gain no other way.
As Richard Branson shared with me during
my visit to Necker Island, we mustn’t be embarrassed by our failures.
Instead, we need to learn from them and use them to “fail
forward” and succeed faster than we would had we risked nothing.
As I wrote in Brave, “The
things we want most lie on the other side of what scares us most.”
Unless we are willing to risk failure,
we will never come to know what we are capable of achieving.
It’s why the most successful people risk failure again
and again and again but never allow themselves to be defined by it.
So if your story of past failures hasn’t been moving you
forward, then it’s time you rewrite one that will.
Find Your Courage, Stop Playing Safe, Train
the Brave and Make Your Mark — Margie’s four best-selling books speak to her
passion for emboldening people to take braver actions and make their biggest
mark in work, leadership and life. A sought after keynote speaker and media
commentator, Margie Warrell draws on her diverse international background in
business, psychology and coaching. Host of the Live Brave podcast, Margie has
worked with global leaders such as Richard Branson and sits on the advisory
board of Forbes Business School. An intrepid Aussie with a special passion for
empowering women change makers, she’s also the mother of four brave hearted
children. More on Margie at www.margiewarrell.com.
https://www.success.com/how-to-reframe-your-failures/
Don't Quit no matter 
Break Through the Wall
If We Hold On Together
You might also like:
Don't Quit no matter
what!
CLICK HERE . . . to view . .
.
...............................................
CLICK HERE . . . to view . .
.
.......................................................
If We Hold On Together
CLICK HERE . . . to view complete playlist . .
.
