Thag Fail

Most of you have probably heard the old time management addage:

Failure to Plan is Planning to Fail

This is an old addage, but very true. I have talked many times about how you need a plan for what to do, otherwise you will just flounder and spin your wheels. I have another saying that is equally important:

Those Who Don't Plan to Fail Will Quit

If you are going to strive for any sort of difficult goal, failure will be nearby. In fact, if you try for anything even remotely difficult, it is highly likely that you will experience failure at some point. Nobody succeeds at everything they attempt. Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, took his chicken recipe to over 900 different restaraunt owners before someone took a chance on it. That means that he had 1 success to over 900 failures. If he was a baseball player, he would have a batting average of 0.001. That's not too good, but his story is one of the greatest success stories in all of commerce.

This is just one example, but if you examine the background of most successful people in the world, you will find a lot of failure. I have a third addage for you:

Failure is an Event, not a Person

Just because you don't succeed on a particular attempt, does not mean that YOU are a failure. It only means that you probably learned something important, such as how not to do what you wanted to do. The true failure comes in if you then stop trying, or if you don't apply that knowledge to your future attempts.

Now I am not making a case for pessimism. Quite the contrary. I want you to expect to achieve your goals, but unless you have a realistic view that takes into account that every day will not be a resounding success, you will give up the first time you experience a setback. Thus, you must have an understanding that failure will occur from time to time. When these failures occur, you must get up and strike back. I suggest that you SLAP failure. The steps to failure recovery are as follows:

Stop- Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. If it is clear that something isn't working, STOP!!! Don't keep running into the same wall.
Learn- After you stop, the first thing you should ask yourself about the failure is "what did I learn from this?" To do this, you have to turn off the embarassed, overwhelmed, and sad voices in your head which tell you that you cannot succeed. We all have these, but the people who succeed have learned how to quiet them.
Alter- Using the experience that you gained from step two, you must now alter your course. This could mean anything from making a minor tweak to changing your entire world view. The important thing is to recognize that a change must be made, and make it.
Persevere- Winston Churchill made a speech during World War II, when the British people seemed on the brink of losing to Hitler. In this speech was the iconic phrase "never, never, never give up!" Mr. Churchill knew that the most important component to the success formula is perseverence. If a goal is truly important to you, then how many times you "fail" should not matter. Just pick yourself up, dust off, learn what you can, and try again. Even if you have already failed 900 times, that next time may be the one that puts you over the top!

So good luck to you, and never, never, never give up.