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Fail to Succeed

Written by: George Ludwig

Article Overview: Failure is never the end of the road. Failure is how you learn and grow. Whether it's building biceps, achieving financial freedom, becoming the best parent possible, or reaching the Oval Office: you must fail to succeed.

Fail to Succeed

Identify someone you consider to be successful and ask that person how many failures he or she had before success came. I guarantee you that any successful person had to learn failure before success. That's what learning is all about: doing it wrong in order to get it right. We don't all succeed at everything we try. Most of us go through failure to reach success, just as we go through fear in order to build courage.

Weightlifting is a great example to illustrate this process of going through failure to reach success. Years ago, when I started building up my scrawny 112 pound body through weight training, my first instructor introduced me to the concept of "going for failure." I didn't think that sounded so fun-"Let's go fail!"-but my coach explained that breaking a muscle down by exhausting it totally was the best way to build it stronger. By going to failure, I prepared my muscles for greater success." I failed so that I eventually could succeed.

Life is no different. Failure is a necessary part of growing and building strength to eventually succeed. Consider the case of a lanky Midwestern boy who chopped wood for his father until he was twenty-one, but who had always hungered for more out of life. He started borrowing books and reading every evening. What he read began to inspire and motivate him to become a risk-taker in the pursuit of success. He was willing to fail in order to succeed, and fail is exactly what he did:

- At age 23 he ran as a candidate for state legislature and lost.
- At age 30 he was bankrupt.
- At age 32 the woman he loved and intended to marry broke off the engagement breaking his heart.
- At age 33 he married another woman who bore him four sons, of which three he lost because they died before reaching adulthood.
- At age 35 he ran again as a candidate for state legislature and again he lost.
- At age 47 he was selected a vice-presidential candidate and again he lost.
- At age 49 he was nominated for the United States Senate and again he lost.

The man described above, however, was elected President of the United States of America at age 51. His frequent experiences of failure gave Abraham Lincoln the resolve to handle the great challenges of his Presidency and the repeated initial failure of the Union forces. He never saw failure as a reason to stop attempting success, and he ultimately changed the course of American history.

Failure is never the end of the road. Failure is how you learn and grow. Whether it's building biceps, achieving financial freedom, becoming the best parent possible, or reaching the Oval Office: you must fail to succeed.

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Article Tags: adulthood, borrowing books, coach, courage, failure, fear, heart, midwestern boy, muscles, pound body, presidential candidate, risk taker, state legislature, united states senate, weightlifting
Referred by: http://www.JustChangeIt.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: 10 Reasons Who Startups Fail & Book Recommendations - Great post,but please edit the headline. I presume it is "10 Reasons Why Startups Fail & Book Recommendation
Re: What inspires you? - Another inspiring thing is which I really likes "Most People Fail because, their dreams are small". Most people like to engage with something or teh other. If they can truly listen to their inner voice and work towards achieving it, then you can see "miracle in action". So, big changes happen, when you think BIG. If you cannot to think BIG, you cannot do BIG things too. Robert
Re: Books for Business Owners - Hi DougSchadle, Thanks for sharing your favorite business book with us! A good book I'm reading now is "Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed" by Brian Tracy as it was a birthday gift from a friend. Tracy's book is helpful in identifying what's important in your life and then setting an action plan to achieve it.
Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succ - Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succeed Ronna Lichtenberg 2005 From the inside cover: "As a woman, you probably feel uncomfortable when it comes to promoting yourself and asking for what you want." WHAT IN THE HECK IS THIS, I asked myself when I read that. Women are the fastest growing business owners in the US and Canada, there are t housands of women executives and CEOs - though not as many as might be expected, admittedly, yet the book opens with this surely out of date stereotype. However, as she continued to give examples of women who had high paying jobs but were routinely not paid as much as men because it hadn't occurred to them to ask for raises, etc., I decided it was probably true for a majority of businesswomen... Anyway, more of the info from the jacket: "Other books have told you how to get what you want by being more like a guy. Pitch Like A Girl tells you why its an advantage to be who you are and how to do better by bringing more of yourself to work." The TOC: 1. Pink and Blue 2. The Quck-dry Chapter 3. What's In your head that's not in his 4. The Me, Inc Mindset 5. Visioning: Discover What You Really Want 6. Identifying Prospects 7. Pre-pitch homework and heartwork 8. Crafting the pitch 9. Pricing the pitch 10. Packaging the pitch 11. Delivering the pitch 12. Closing Conclusion A Word to the guys The Empathy Quotient The Systemizing Quotient Bibliography And on a side note - non-fiction books without indexes - of which this is one, annoy me.
Why women don't charge more - I just read a chapter in Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succeed, by Ronna Lichtenberg that deals with this. THe chapter is called Pricing the Pitch. "In a WAll Street Journal article about what might be holding women back from corporate success, Terry Dal, a former vice president at Wells Fargo bank, said, "Good girls don't advertise; only prostitutes advertise. We feel dirty promoting ourselves." The author's advice: The first step in getting the money you desserve is to understand the market rate for your offering. Not what you think you need, not what they're willing to pay, but the going rate for similar goods and services offered in your area by someone with your skills and experience. Then, seek expert advice. "Men routinely consult lawyers, financial advisers, exxecutive recruiters and any other paid counselors to help them assess what constitutes a fair fee." Your research into going rates should not lead you to a single price for your pitch but rather a range of prices - both a market range and a personal range, which should overlap but won't necessarily be identical. In pricing, one size does not fit all. The final step in determining your price is to consider what you think you'd be paid for the same job if you were a man. The author also discusses why women usually discount their prices (must'n't appear too over-confident), the difference between discounting and "giving a discount", and other issues. I'd advise every woman wondering about what to charge to read at least this chapter of the book.


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