Convert Failure Into Success

We all deal with failure, sometimes on a weekly or a daily basis. It’s really tough to get past it. But every time I fail, every time I feel like not doing something, I always think about a few things. So let me share with you what goes through my head when I experience failure and how I turn that failure into a good thing.

Failure Is Your Friend

So first, let’s think about what do these people have in common — all the people I’m listing here — Donald Trump, Larry King, P.T. Barnum, Walt Disney, Marvin Gaye, Willie Nelson, Don Johnson from Miami Vice, Ed McMahon, the Publisher’s Clearing House guy, Burt Reynolds, Kim Basinger. What about Mark Twain, Michael Jackson? What about these U.S. presidents — Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln, William McKinley, Thomas Jefferson?

What do they all have in common?

What they all have in common is they all went bankrupt. They all had huge financial problems, and they had to declare bankruptcy and start over, and they built it back up. So that’s the difference between a one-hit wonder and somebody who fails and fails and fails and succeeds is that they don’t get lucky; they make their own luck. They fail, but the failures lead to learning and they eventually lead to a time when they don’t fail.

So it’s okay to fail, especially if you’re somebody like Washington Mutual. When the whole recession thing was happening on all the bank failures, on September 25th, 2008, the bank Washington Mutual had $307 billion in assets, but they went bankrupt and were bought by J.P. Morgan Chase for less than $2 billion. So to go from $300 billion to $2 billion in — what?

A month or so? That’s pretty bad.

Who else has failed? The Ford Motor Company, when they marketed the Edsel — considered their biggest failure — they lost $250 million in less than a year, from 1958 to ’59. So they had this great idea for a car, and nobody liked it. And Enron was once valued at $90 billion — this energy company — and they were badly mismanaged, and they went out.

Dr. Atkins, the inventor of the Atkins Diet, had to lose weight. He weighed 258 pounds when he died. He died of a heart attack. And Coca-Cola came out with a new Coke. They redid their recipe, and they wasted $4 million in advertising in 77 days only to get all kinds of publicity and to lose market share to Pepsi-Cola and to go back to their original recipe.

So in a month — two and a half months they wasted $4 million.

For more failures let’s look at the dot-com bubble. You could see over and over these companies that became huge successes overnight and got huge amounts of venture capital, but then when it all came crashing down, their stock price plummeted.

Pets.com was valued at $11 per share in February 2000. When they had their initial public offering, I think they had the biggest gain when they first opened. I think their stock went up 600 percent when they first offered their price to the public. So in February 2000, it cost $11 per share. By November of that same year, that stock was worth 19 cents per share.

Yahoo at its peak was worth $128 per share, but then after the bubble first it sunk to $4 per share. The stock dropped 97 percent after the dot-com bubble. You can just look at tons and tons of companies that did great during the dot-com era, but they just dropped to almost nothing.

The Palm, the makers of those handheld things, they dropped from $95 in March 2000, and they dropped 94 percent almost down to $6 in June 2001.

So all these companies with millions of dollars and all these employees and all these managers who have MBA’s and who have decades of experience still screwed up.

Even Bigger Failures Are Your Friend

Lets Look at software failures cases ?

Those are huge because — and it’s even funnier because with software you have big, big margins. If you think about things like retail, you can understand if those fail; and banks, you can understand if those fail because there’s all kinds of legislation, and people take on bad loans. Even stuff like engineering maybe you can excuse that because back in the 12th century maybe they didn’t know everything there was to know about building towers.

But software — how can you screw up software? You design a program, and you sell it for 20 bucks, 50 bucks a pop, and it only costs you $1 per disc to make. So how can you screw up software?

Well, the Atari Computer Company, in 1981 they made a Pac-Man game. That’s the game where the guy chomps on the little dots and runs around and gets chased by ghosts. When Atari came out with the 2600 model and they had Pac-Man on its other machines, and Pac-Man was the most popular game and the Atari 2600 was the most popular model, so they said “All right. Let’s put the two together. Let’s port Pac-Man to our 2600 model.”

But they rushed it, and the programmers didn’t do a very good job, and the graphics were horrible. They made 12 million game cartridges and only sold 7 million of them. So they had these 5 million cartridges left over, and they took a huge loss. Then they made a similar mistake the next year when they made their E.T. game. So it’s the same situation where they took something really popular, which was the movie E.T.

They spent tons of money to buy the rights to it. The graphics sucked; the game itself sucked. They just relied on the popularity of the movie E.T. to get lots of sales, and they ended up with another 5 million cartridges for E.T., and they ended up having to bury all that stuff in a big landfill in the desert in New Mexico. And this all contributed, all these losses, to the video game crash of 1983. Then a year later they went totally bankrupt in 1984 with half a million in dollars in debt.

So you think about how do these software companies, who make tons of profit for every machine they make and every game they make, they just screw up sometimes.

Turning Things Around

So things happen. Even the smartest people in the world screw up. So the mind state you need to have is just one of no complaints. So if you mess up, don’t complain about how bad things are. If you want to say something bad, do it but turn it into how you can fix it.

So don’t feel sorry for yourself. Just take a bad thing and redirect it into something positive. So if you screwed up, if you’ve lost money on something, you can say, “I shouldn’t do that again,” or “I should do this again, but I should have changed this thing.” Or “Maybe I don’t have enough time during the day to make videos, so I’m going to fix that by waking up one hour early.

I’m going to fix that by dedicating every day from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. to record videos,” and so on.

Because complaining is most people’s problem. It’s so easy to make a little tiny screwup and complain about it, and then you just reaffirm that screwup and you feel worse. Then you complain about complaining and so on. It’s just a downward spiral towards making you feel like crap.

So an easy way to fix complaining is you put a rubber band on your wrist, and you always have it there. Every time you catch yourself complaining about something, you snap it on your wrist and then change to the other wrist so that you’ll just notice every time you complain. You’ll notice that, №1, it hurts and that you have the rubber band on the other wrist now.

So it’s okay to be negative, but if you don’t offer a positive solution, a positive outcome, then it’s just a complaint.

So what can you do to avoid failure or at least convert your failures into successes?

Have a Specific Goal

Have a specific goal. Something that will guarantee failure is not having goals, not knowing where you’re going or making your goals either too vague or too specific. If you’re planning for stuff way in the future, then you have an idea of where you want to be, but you don’t want to have too much detail. If you have too many goals, then you’re just going to make life more complicated for yourself. You’re going to have too many things to complain about, and you’re going to get overwhelmed.

So you want to have maybe four goals for today, four goals for the month, four goals for the year, four goals for the next five years. Just don’t have that in your head all the time. Just be thinking about what needs to be done today, but have it written down on a paper somewhere where you are headed. You just can’t make that big jump. You have to make small steps.

So a good story about this is the guy who learned how to eat an elephant — no, what did he do?

He ate a bicycle. The idea is the same. It’s how do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time. This guy, he got into the Guinness Book of World Records by eating a bicycle. And what he did is he just took a metal bike and he ground it up into a powder. And he would just sprinkle a little bit on his food every day. He’d sprinkle it on his cereal, on his steak, on his sandwiches; and over the course of a few years, he ate a whole bicycle.

So that’s a powerful story that just tells you that you can do anything if you do it in small steps. So if you want to make your e-book, figure out what needs to be done to finish that. Not only do you need the steps, but you need to know what step is next. So if you have to write an e-book that’s 7 chapters, then you know that you first need to write chapter 1. Then after that’s done you need to write chapter 2. So there’s no thinking about “Maybe I need to jump back to chapter 6, work on chapter 4, then chapter 5.” You can’t do that. You have to say “My task for today is to write chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4.”

Visualize The Success

Then visualize future successes. So what are you building towards? If you’re making this e-book, is it going to get you some money?

Is it going to get you some subscribers?

So maybe picture yourself in the future when you’re looking at your list of customers or if you’re looking at your PayPal account.

And then always take consistent action instead of talking about what you’re going to do. I’m sure you’ve met people like this who will just talk your ear off about what they’re going to do next, what they’re going to do after that.

They go on and on into more and more detail, and then by the time they’ve told you everything they’re exhausted, and they felt like they’ve actually gotten something accomplished when they’ve gotten nothing accomplished.

So it’s really easy to brag, and it’s really easy to just get ideas and talk about them and lead to more and more ideas. That doesn’t get anything finished. It just gets you in love with the sound of your own voice. So you need to take consistent action instead of talking.

So instead of talking about what you’re going to do, why don’t you do something and then talk about what you just did?

So reverse it, because otherwise you’re going to spend all your energy and all your time talking about what you’re going to do or what you should have done, and you’ll never get anything finished.

So I’d rather be the guy who secretly works on stuff and secretly makes a bunch of extra money than the guy who brags about money he doesn’t have. So do stuff instead of talking about stuff. Start taking action instead of talking action.

Have Focus

And then have focus. So work on what you know you’re good at. If you’re good at writing stuff, then write stuff. If you’re good at copywriting stuff, then copywrite stuff. If you’re good at recording videos, then record videos, but keep doing what you know you’re good at.

Every once in a while you might want to learn skills and new skills, but you’re only going to really add one or two skills at a time; whereas if you compare the ten skills you’re really, really good at.

So you might be good at video, and then you want to learn about how to write more, so you’ll learn about that. But if you record videos every day, you’re never really going to give up video. So if you learn something new, you’re only really just going to improve what you’re already doing and try new technology like live streaming, editing and others

And then with video shooting and editing experience , it provde more opportunity that when I had a chance to co-host some webinars. It was outside of my comfort zone, but I just went ahead and did it. I bit the bullet, and I really sucked, but I got through it. Then came the time when I had to host my own webinars, and I was really nervous, and I sucked. But after five or ten minutes once I got used to it, it was no problem. And then I had to give more webinars the following week, and because I did okay with that first webinar, I just built on that success, that good feeling I got.

And then hosting those webinars led to being in some interviews on the phone, like a live call that was broadcast out to thousands of people and got me some good exposure. If I hadn’t been practicing on those webinars, I wouldn’t have done an interview. If I hadn’t been practicing on those videos, I wouldn’t have done the webinar. And if I hadn’t been actively working on improving my public speaking, I wouldn’t even have done the videos. So one good thing leads to another good thing leads to another good thing.

If you’re overwhelmed, think about can you take a break?

Can you stop for five or ten minutes and just let your emotions go down? Can you switch to a menial task?

Can you go do the dishes?

Can you mow the lawn?

Can you get the mail?

Can you run around the block?

Can you get in your car and drive just to clear your brain and just to calm down and reset yourself?

You Are Bigger Than Your Problems

It helps to think about you are bigger than your problems. You’re this person; you’re this giant person, and if you’re nervous about your public speaking, that’s just a very small, little minuscule part of you. It’s never going to be bigger than you. You’re never going to have a problem that’s way bigger than you are. It’s always inside. It’s always some little tiny sliver of you that you can just snuff out. You need to know the right thing to do to snuff it out. You just focus on one thing at a time, and you make your own luck.

You might step on the street tomorrow and get run over by a car or get shot or die of cancer or fall off a cliff. These things can happen. So the only way to get around that is if you get hit by a car and you’re in the hospital, you just feel better about it. You’re like “I’m going to heal. I’m going to be better.” If you get shot, maybe you live; maybe you die. Hopefully you did stuff in the meantime to make your life worthwhile. But if some freak accident happens — if you get hit by a car or you get shot or you get cancer — you’re not going to blame somebody for that happening. It’s just the way life works sometimes.

And then think about what caused your failure. So maybe you took on too big of a challenge. If you were trying to get better at speaking and you just really sucked and you made no improvement, maybe you were trying to focus on too many things at once, trying to focus on the enunciation and the projection and the um’s and ah’s and the pauses and the nervous shifting. Maybe you were trying to focus on all those things at once and you should have just had a small goal. Or maybe you were taking on the wrong goal.

So maybe you were giving a presentation about something where you have no experience at all, and you should be presenting about stuff where you do have experience. Or maybe you just need to study more so you can get that subject down so you are not as worried that somebody will stump you or that you will say the wrong thing.

Maybe you’re just repeating things that don’t work. Maybe you keep trying public speaking or keep presenting to the wrong crowd that just hates you. Maybe you keep putting out these products in a niche where nobody cares. Maybe you’re putting out a product that teaches you how to quit your day job in 15 years, and nobody wants to wait 15 years to quit their day job.

They want to quit their day job in a year or in three months; so maybe you’re just marketing stuff to the wrong market. You might just be trying something over and over that just does not work.

Here’s what I think when I have failure, when something doesn’t go my way, or I feel like I have bad luck supposedly — here are a few things that run through my head.

Make The Story

First of all, it’ll make a good story. If I ask some chick out on a date and she says no, then I think “Well, it’ll make a good story.” When I lost $30,000 in the stock market over a period of a few weeks, I think “It’ll make a good story.” If somebody tells me how they lost 500 bucks in the stock market, I can say “Hey, guess what? I lost way more than that.”

And I think about — I would feel bad if somebody else succeeded in an easier way. So if I were making an e-book and I just can’t get the last chapter finished, I would think “What if somebody comes up with the same idea and beats me to the market and gets a bunch of money? Then I would totally miss out and I would feel so jealous that I just didn’t finish that last chapter of the e-book or that I didn’t put out the e-book as it is.”

And I think about don’t share about everything you know. Don’t tell people everything you’re thinking, everything you’re doing, because you’re going to end up spending a lot of time just talking. You’re going to spend a lot of time failing, and people will be aware of your failures. Or maybe they’ll use what you share with them to their advantage.

So if you’re telling them “I’m writing an e-book on this and this and this,” maybe they’ll say “That’s a great idea.” Then they go off to a ghostwriter, and a few days later they come out with their own thing that’s exactly the idea you shared with them.

Before you can succeed you need to fail so that you know what failing is like. Then when you actually succeed, you know what that is, too. Think about did what happened hurt you, or did it make you stronger?

Did it make you more aware of what not to do? Did it make you more aware of what to do? Did it just make you wiser?

And you need to fail fast. You need to fail fast to get all of the failures out of the way so you can get to the final success.

So here are a couple of quotes. One is from Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb. He says “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” So he tried 10,000 different materials to make the lightbulb until he discovered the right one.

Wayne Gretzky says “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” So you can have your hockey puck and try to hit the goal, and you can keep trying to hit the goal. Maybe out of a hundred shots you miss 99 and you hit 1. So you miss 99 times, and you make it into the goal once. But what if you never hit your puck towards the goal?

You’ll never make it in. So if there were 500 shots you could have made that you don’t make, then you’re definitely going to miss 500 different times. So you just need to do something and try it. Maybe it’ll work and maybe it’ll fail, but the way to guarantee failure is to not do anything.

To stay motivated you need a pleasure motivator and a negative motivator. So today I had to record, I think, 15 videos. I had a limited amount of time, and I needed to have these things in my head to think about what happens if I meet my goal. If I meet my goal, then I will have a bunch more free time where I can focus on other projects and I won’t have to think about these videos I have to make.

A negative motivator would be if I don’t meet my goal, then I’ll still be worried about it, and it’ll still suck up time that I could be using for better things.

Then in the meantime, I’m making it fun because I’m goofing around and making jokes and just acting stupid on the video. So it’s not like work; it’s like I’m goofing off. Then I have, for those times when it gets tough, I’ll switch to a menial task like going off and taking a walk or going to the grocery store or checking the mail or mowing the lawn.

Sometimes it’ll get tough. It’s not always going to be easy, but when it does get tough, I have a way to kill a couple of minutes — not like hours and hours — but just a way to take a quick break to recharge my batteries.

So what you’re supposed to do now is plan out a goal; achieve that goal; and use the success of that, use the good feelings, to launch the next goal. Failure is just a way of telling you what you should change.

If the economy goes into a recession, it doesn’t mean that we all suck and the world is ending, it just means that we’re weeding out the crappy businesses that should not be in business anyway.

So don’t get stressed out. Just stay in motion. If something doesn’t work, think about what’s the next thing that you should do instead of just sitting around and wallowing.