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Failing Forward

The Big Idea

Failing forward tells you how to look at life’s setbacks and learn from your mistakes. If you haven’t failed at anything, it means you haven’t really taken a risk at anything. Failures are only as bad as you perceive them to be. Life is much better when you live, and try, and fail. Living requires failing every now and then. The basic steps to moving on and failing forward are:

• Realize there is one major difference between average people and achievers. The difference is in how they respond to failure
• Learn a new definition of failure.
• Remove the “you” from failure. Don’t take it personally.
• Take action and reduce your fear.
• Change your response to failure by accepting responsibility.
• Don’t let failure from outside get inside you.
• Say good-bye to yesterday.
• Change yourself, and your world changes.
• Get over yourself and start giving yourself.
• Find the benefit in every bad experience.
• If at first you do succeed, try something harder.
• Learn from a bad experience and make it a good experience. . . . . .

What’s the main difference between average people and people who achieve?

Regardless of family background, wealth, opportunities, morality, or hardships and trials, it is people’s perception of and response to failures that sets achievers apart from the mediocre.

People are training for success when they should be training for failure. Disappointments are more prevalent and life is full of them. The question is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with them.

Mary Kay cosmetics is a company with more than 1 billion dollars in annual sales, employs 3,500 people, and empowers 500,000 direct-sales consultants worldwide. Mary Kay Ash survived her husband’s untimely death, right before the opening of her business in 1963. She had taken a risk on her $5,000 life savings to start her own company, and despite her personal tragedy, she launched the business that is now a leading beauty company.

Read through these two lists and determine which one describes your approach to failure:

Failing Backward

Blaming others, repeating the same mistakes, expecting never to fail again, expecting to continually fail, accepting tradition blindly, being limited by past mistakes, thinking I am a failure, quitting.

Failing Forward

Taking responsibility, learning from each mistake, knowing failure is a part of progress, maintaining a positive attitude, challenging outdated assumptions, taking new risks, believing something didn’t work, persevering. . . . . .