“I think everyone should be an expert in failure. If you cannot learn to fail, you cannot possibly learn to succeed” – Kevin Larroque
Someone reminded me yesterday that I used to tell them things like this all the time…The irony is that I was sitting in on a Soul Mapping seminar last night, and although my religious views are, for lack of a better term, non-existent, I found the topic very interesting. The idea that we all have a purpose, and we just have not found it yet, and through this process one can find out what their path is and find greatness.
I really find this an interesting topic, as I am the constant skeptic on anything non-scientific I did actually find something out about myself and I thought I would share that with you today…Typically I am very pragmatic, to the point, no bs, facts only, science first, and yet I found myself listening to someone tell me that a “higher being” had a purpose for me, and although I cannot totally agree to that extent I will say this: We are ALL born with the ability to achieve greatness, we just have to get back to the basics, the very thing we were born with, the ability to try, try again, and fail, then try again until it works and never letting yourself feel like falling down, or getting knocked down is anything BUT a learning lesson for the next attempt…
I can prove it: All of us were born with this ability to overcome obstacles, think about it-when you were a little baby you made your way around the world on your hands and knees. Crawling around watching people around you walk, run, jump, and all you wanted to do was be like them…So every so often you worked on developing the skills needed to do what they were doing, walking! You probably grabbed onto the coffee table trying to brace yourself, or maybe you had a favorite chair that you crawled up, stood there for a second, let go all wobbly and scared, and you fell. You did it again the next day, and you took that first step, but again you fell. People around you were probably clapping, and if at my house someone probably cried! So you kept watching, learning, and you noticed that the people around you were putting one foot in front of the other. After days of grabbing the chair, grabbing the pant legs of your parents, and side stepping around the furniture in the house, holding onto to Mom and Dad’s hands you finally took a few steps, all alone, all with the knowledge YOU developed and mastered over time.
It sounds cliché, but mastering, or fine tuning whatever it is in your life that you love or are passionate about is so unbelievably simple it can only be told as “taking baby-steps”. Yesterday I posted a quote by Bill Gates about how many times he fails “85 percent of the time…” just goes to show you that even the uber successful find more failure than success, and why? In the process of learning how to walk, you probably spent more time failing than you did succeeding. But did you ever have the thought of quitting? Did you ever tell yourself, "I'm not cut out for walking-guess I'll crawl for the rest of my life?" No, of course you didn't. So, why do you do that now? What's different today with any goal you want and desire you have for accomplishing anything? When did you lose the ability to make a goal, go for it, and get it? How come you don't do what you did when you were one or two years old? The answer is alarming, yet simple:
Somewhere along the way in your life, you became unwilling to take baby steps. You lost faith in the universal truth that the simple little disciplines done again and again over time would move the mightiest mountains. My point is that you have to master the little things before you can move onto the bigger things…greed, envy, and laziness will try its hardest to thwart you from these simple yet fundamentally necessary tasks…
The truth is that 95% of you that read this will fail! Only 5% of you that read this will actually take initiative and do those little things that can make you succeed. The difference between those that fail and those that don’t is so ridiculously small that any little thing you can do to improve yourself in any way could, and will, make the difference in your life. I am not much of a NASCAR fan, but the concept here is very relevant – a couple of weeks ago the winner was decided by less than .001 of a second…500 miles of racing, 33 cars, 33 experienced professional drivers all racing for the title at speeds of over 180mph and it came down to .001 of a second! Can you sit there and tell me that the person who finished .001 behind the winner was a failure? Your initial instinct will say no, but who will be remembered in that race? The person who finished second, even though only by a blink of an eye, or the one that stood atop the podium with that checkered flag…They all have failed, probably came close to death in car crashes, and all of them push themselves to the limits of their bodies and repeated the “little things”. Some of them may have practiced something a little bit differently and maybe, that day, that particular winner had really focused on mastering draft techniques out of corners, and look what that did for him!
If you have that slight edge over the rest of the people you too can be remembered…Take time today and fine tune something, no matter how little you might think it is – someday it may prove to be the slight edge you needed to stand on that podium!
All the best,
KL
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