Success Hinges on Your Failures
What if, starting today, the word 'no' didn't stop you anymore?
What if every time you heard the word no, you became stronger, more powerful, and more resilient?
What if the greatest success strategy in the world was not to go for yes, but to go for no?
Well, it is.
The word 'no' doesn't have to debilitate you. In fact, it can empower you to achieve a whole new level of greatness you never dreamed possible. You might think this is just a sales strategy. It is a sales strategy. But it's a life philosophy too.
Whether we define ourselves as salespeople or not, we are all engaged in the sales process. We all must overcome fears of failure and rejection to be successful and achieve what we want.
Here are my top five secrets to help you turn failure into success immediately!
1) Change your mental model of "success" and "failure".
Most people operate with the following mental model: SUCCESS ⇔ YOU ⇔ FAILURE
They see themselves in the middle, with success on one end and failure on the other. They do everything they can to move toward success and away from failure. But, what if you reconfigured that model?
YOU ⇒ FAILURE ⇒ SUCCESS
Instead of viewing failure as something to be avoided, turn it into a "stepping-stone" on the path to success and gratification. In other words: Success is the destination. Failure is how you get there.
To achieve significant success in today's world, failure is not just a possibility. It's a requirement. We must see success and failure for what they truly are. They're not opposites, but instead opposite sides of the same coin.
2) Intentionally increase your failure rate.
If it's true that the more we fail, the more we succeed (and it is), then your immediate goal should be to intentionally increase your failure rate! With this thought in mind, you're succeeding even when you fail. Yes, this is a counter-intuitive, reverse thinking philosophy. But trust me, it works!
Intentionally increasing failure is the basis for the "Go for No" concept. "Go for No" means the more people tell you "no," the closer you will get to ultimate success. In other words, the more people telling you "no" now, the more people will say "yes" in the long term. If they actually counted the number of times they hear "no" during a typical day or week, most people would be shocked to see how low the number actually is. Go ahead and try it!
3) Set "No" goals.
Everyone sets success goals. But how about setting goals for the number of times we fail? For example, rather than a salesperson setting the goal of having two prospects say "yes" to them, they set the goal of being rejected (hearing "no") 10 times. Imagine the first two prospects they called on said, "Yes!" Rather than being done (having hit their "yes" goal), they'd actually be behind because they still have 10 "no's" to go!
The other exciting aspect of this strategy is how it keeps people "in the game" when they're "red hot." If all you have is yes goals and then you slow down (or quit) when you're successful, the hot streak ends. But if you keep going when the yeses of life are falling at your feet, the sky is the limit!
4) Celebrate your failures, not just your successes.
It's natural to be excited about our successes. Yes, you want to celebrate them. Yes, you want to give yourself a reward or even throw a party.
But, if the key to success is to increase our failures, then it only makes sense to celebrate our set backs as well. Yes, you heard right: if someone turns you down, celebrate it!
When is the last time you rewarded yourself for failing? Probably never! Instead of mentally punishing yourself for not succeeding, buy yourself an ice cream cone and say, "I'm one step closer to success!" Stop letting failure have the negative hold it has on your thoughts and emotions.
5) See courage as a "muscle".
If failure is a vehicle that can take you to success, then courage is the fuel! Courage is a muscle. And, like any muscle, you must develop and strengthen it with lots of exercise.
As the saying goes: Use it, or lose it. It's no different with courage. Use and develop your "courage muscle" by looking fear in the eye and taking action anyway. Each time you take action, the courage muscle gets stronger.
When you don't, it atrophies. And before you know it your courage is gone. But it doesn't have to be this way. All the courage you could ever want or need to achieve every goal you have is already in you, just waiting for you to take action.
So, change your mental models, intentionally increase your failure rate, set "no" goals, celebrate your failures and see courage as a muscle, and you'll significantly increase your success rate in six months guaranteed. Remember, this strategy is not just a sales strategy. It is not just for businesses. It's for every aspect of your personal and professional lives.
Thoughts on ‘Learning from failure or success’
Several weeks ago Mark Gould blogged about whether we learned better from instances of failure or instances of success. The post is interesting and I suggest you give it a read.I don’t have any specific comments on what Mark has written beyond saying that I mostly agree with what he wrote; instead I would like to share some thoughts stemming from my own experience and views.
Bottom line, I’m of the view that failure is a better source of learning than success. Here’s an example which typifies my position.
Mrs. Knowledgethoughts and I are expecting our first child. As part of the process, every old wives’ tale and theory comes out of the woodwork. One of my favourites is that the severeness of morning sickness is indicative of the baby’s sex. The thinking goes that if there is morning sickness the child is more likely to be a girl, if there isn’t, a boy. A quick squiz on various baby forums shows this theory to be false and also shows cognitive fallacy at play.
“It’s true for me, so it must be true”
Which works for about two posts until contrary evidence is presented.
Correlation does not imply causation, and learning only from success often stems from correlation, the same type of learning that led us into the credit crisis (these CDSs make money now so they must do so in the future). It is just as easy to find examples of failure should you only look so far, and a single instance of failure proves the theory incorrect. Success can attributed to any number of variables, and that attribution may or may not be correct. Failure forces us to confront our Cognitive Bias, our tendency to make errors in judgement based upon cognitive factors. Failure forces an adjustment of our mental model.Our adjustments won’t necessarily be correct, but in the process we have gained two valuable pieces of knowledge:
- our mental model is not correct… yet; and
- our understanding of the situation is not perfect
The second point is even more important because it shocks us into the unavoidable conclusion that our belief was mistaken and that future beliefs may also be incorrect and will require more rigorous conception.
I’ll close this post by sharing an example from my programming past:
When writing software, my first pass at coding is full of holes and flaws. I usually focus on implementing the perfect scenario. The user types the right thing, hits the right button and gets the right answer.
Perfect, but all I really know is that my software can handle correct input. I could run the software 100 times and get a right answer, but I haven’t learned anything about what’s wrong with it.
Fortunately I know from hundreds of previous bugs that my limited success is insufficient, and set about seeing how my system copes with unexpected inputs; users entering dates in the wrong format, missing out fields or clicking “submit” 50 times. The system will then fail time after time after time, whereby I refine the code (the model) and over time it becomes more robust, a process only becomes possible by intentionally seeking failure.
Ever come across a piece of software that didn’t work?Don’t you wish the developer responsible had failed just one more time?
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