How do you handle failure? Personal failures like your girlfriend/boyfriend breaking up with you or professional failures like losing your job, not getting the promotion you’ve been working so hard for. How do you handle that? 

Successful people don’t have different problems, they have different solutions. 

Failure is part of the game but we really fucked up our view of failure. I partially blame the education system that has taught us failure is bad. As a result, most of us look at failure like this.

This is our world view. Whether we realize it or not. Most people look at it like this. It’s a problem that started as soon as elementary school. You either pass the class or fail. You either fail or you succeed.

The day you were born, were you able to jump, run, hurl, climb or talk? No I dont think so. That’s kinda crazy, right? So what would happen when you’re seven days old, you’re rolling around, your mom looks at you and goes, “you know, I just don’t think he is going to be a walker”. Crazy right? Because we know what the path is. They all fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, then walk. That’s the natural path yet somehow we got reprogrammed.

So when you look at the success formula it should look more like this: 

You cannot avoid failure. You go through it. In fact, everybody I know that tries to avoid any failure avoids life. They run away from everything. They don’t grow.

Have you ever attempted something and didn’t fail the first time? Whether it be a video game, sports, instruments, relationships or even money.

We fail until we don’t. So we got to embrace the  suck and use the failure to our advantage

That’s our way of success. I need to know how good somebody is at failing. Can they respond to it effectively and learn the lessons? I promise you, everyone has moments when they fail. Everyone has moments when they’re down and on the top of their game. What separates people who succeed, and those who do not is their willingness to fail forward.