AttractAnything! (The Blog)

Do Successful People Fail More Often than Others…?

Everyone fails. No matter how successful you are, and how great your success mindset is, sometimes you are going to try things that just don’t work out for you. Someone recently reminded me that Henry Ford went bankrupt five times before finding success with the Model T.

Think about that just a minute — many people would have been ready to throw in the towel after just one or two bankruptcies, but Ford persisted even after five major business failures. Now THAT is a success mindset!

Henry Ford’s story reminds me of a very counterintuitive point about success: successful people fail more often than others. It sounds paradoxical, but even a cursory glance at the world’s most successful people proves that they have had more failures (and often large and devastating failures like bankruptcies) than the average person.

The reason why successful people fail more often is pretty obvious when you think about it. Successful people take risks; they don’t sit on the sidelines watching the world go by (like the majority of people). And because people with the success mindset try more things and are not afraid to put themselves “out there,” they often have more failures in their past than others.

Take a moment to REALLY think about what this means. Successful people are not successful because they don’t fail — they are successful because they don’t quit.

In fact, many times our “failures” are not failures at all. Having failed at many things in my life, I can honestly say that 99% of them were learning experiences that brought me one step closer to success. In this sense, you could say that every “failure” is actually just a step along the road to success.

Another great acheiver with an undeniable success mindset, Thomas Edison, tried 10,000 different variations before discovering a filament that would burn correctly to create an electric light bulb. A reporter once asked Edison, “How did it feel to fail 10,000 times trying to create an electric light?” Edison replied, “I never failed once — creating the electric light was a process that had 10,000 steps.”

I think it is wise to remember Edison’s words whenever we fall short of a goal or feel that we have “failed” in some way. More than likely, this perceived “failure” is just a transitory step in the process of success.

I recently uploaded a new video on the AttractAnything YouTube channel discussing the difference between success and failure. Check it out here.

Peace & Prosperity,

Jon
www.attractanything.com

Filed under: Success Mindset