Since I recently participated in a contest but did not win, it feels important
to focus on what I succeeded in doing; what did I accomplish?
When I focused on why I did not win, I contracted a very bad case of the
post-competition blues… we all like to receive something of high value
from someone we admire or from an organization as a proof of how much
THEY value us. It's like proof of how much we are loved and recognized.
Funny how we, as humans, need that kind of confirmation from others to feel self-worth.



But, I have come to believe in my own life that all perceived challenges or
burdens are really gifts in disguise.  My whole life has been
"The long and winding road", a very rocky path, at times when I held
on to my failures and didn't learn from them and move forward.

When I decided to focus on what I had accomplished and also how I can
improve upon what I had done, I began to create solutions to my
problems, instead of letting the problems just revolve around in my head.

People are petrified by failure and therefore do not recognize that it
is the foundation that all success rests on. We also often have the tendency
to blame others for our failures instead of analyzing and learning from
the feedback that we received.

We must learn to persist through failure and not become paralyzed by it.

In the book "Juice, The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class
Inventors" by Evan I. Schwartz the author clearly demonstrates that
the one factor that separates world class inventors from wannabes is
that they celebrate the feedback they receive from FAILURE.   The most
innovative minds recognize that within every failure lies the true and
genuine information that is required to learn how to better understand
the problem and overcome the obstacles that it presents.   They are
fascinated by the feedback they receive and are consistently focused
on experimenting further because of the feedback that will provide.

When most people fail, they STOP.  The same is true for the majority of
corporations. Failure stings when it is expensive, slow and you don't
learn anything from the experience.  When failure is quick, cheap and informative it
creates the very highway you will travel on to success.

The challenge in business is that experiments do not have to be
expensive in terms of time wasted and money lost.   Often tiny,
miniscule changes can result in huge changes in productivity and
profitability.  Legendary direct marketer Ted Nicholas once commented
that he increased his response to one of his advertisements by over
300% by merely changing the headline.

Failure is the biggest phobia most of us ever deal with.  Replace this
nasty term with the word "feedback" and you will
recognize what is necessary to be successful.  There is no failure,
only feedback.

Reinvent failure and design success.

Albert Einstein once commented that the most fundamental question we
can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is
friendly or hostile.   He hypothesized that your answer to that
question would determine your destiny.  If you decide that
the universe is hostile, your immediate response to any problem
only compounds the hostility.  However, the great minds always
teach us that regardless of the problem there is a major lesson to
be understood if we only learn to look for it.   The history of the world
is literally the history of transformative breakthroughs.

What is your greatest problem in life right now?

What is the greatest problem in your business?

Research shows over and over again that the more you acknowledge
your past successes, the more confident you'll become in taking
on new challenges and successfully accomplishing them, so make
a list of the successes you have achieved in your life and focus on the
successes that have a close relation to whatever you are trying to
accomplish today.

Angela Wickenberg