I'm making mistakes all the time. How to learn from your mistakes, that would be
some helpful knowledge, right?
Mistakes, mistakes. We're filming today if you
didn't notice here at Live On Purpose TV and sometimes we have takes and
sometimes we have mistakes where I do something dumb or Nate forgets to get
the equipment set up right or some truck drives by and it just doesn't work. How
many times do we have miss takes? What if we were to redefine mistakes?
Another word we might consider is failures, right? That one feels even more
foreboding, it's like, "Oh, what if I fail?" Right? Did you know that the fear of
failure is something that causes people to not even venture, to not even try
something because they're afraid they're going to fail. I have a little secret
theory that maybe people are more afraid of success than they are at failure because
we've already experienced failure, we know we can deal with that but success,
hmm, we're not quite so sure. That might be the topic of another video. Let's look
at mistakes and failure a little differently. Some of my favorite authors
have written material that might give us some insight here. Robert Kiyosaki for
example, he's the all-time best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad which has
been on the New York Times bestseller list forever and Robert Kiyosaki said,
if you really want to succeed, start failing faster. Interesting. John Maxwell,
legendary leadership, speaker and author, he wrote a book titled Failing Forward.
Interesting concept. One of my good buddies, Brett Harvard, wrote a book
called The 5 Laws That Determine All of Life's Outcomes. One of those five
laws is the law of frequency, meaning frequency
of attempts because there has to be a number of failures for every success.
I've been podcasting now, Live On Purpose Radio, I just hit my 10-year anniversary
at the time of this particular filming and through that entire decade of
interviewing successful people and authors and speakers in these inspiring
people that we all admire, there is a common theme that runs through all of
them and it has to do with exactly this issue.. You get comfortable with failure
because that is part of the recipe for success. As we look at our own mistakes,
and we're going to have some, right? Let me clarify, as long as you're playing the
game, you're going to have some mistakes, okay.
I think the only other alternative is to quit playing and that's probably not
good news. If you're making mistakes, it probably means you're alive and you're
playing the game so that's great because the alternative is that you're dead and
not playing the game. We're all going to make mistakes as we reframe those as
part of the success formula, it suddenly feels different and it's a little easier
to accept. So step one is to redefine mistakes and failure, put it into that
success formula and then we can move to step two. Now I already gave you a little
heads up to step two and it has to do with the fear that we experience around
mistakes or failure. Fear is centered on the same fundamental belief and that
belief is, I can't handle it. Now that usually comes up when our mind asks some
what if question. What if I fail? Oh, I can't handle that. You see, how those go
together? And if you believe that you can't handle it,
it triggers the natural fight-or-flight defensive mechanism in your brain and
then you will avoid whatever it is that you think you can't handle so here's the
step two, answer that what-if question and answer it differently.
Remember, your mind is already telling you you can't handle it so the opposite
of that is, yes, you can handle it. What is it that
you're afraid might happen and then get to that answer, that you know what, I
actually could handle that. So what if I fail that test? What if I fail
that interview? What if I fail that venture? Okay, I could handle that. Now it
doesn't mean that it would be fun because usually, you're going into a
business venture for example and you're thinking, oh my gosh, most new business
ventures fail, what if I fail? Oh, I couldn't handle that. So what do you do?
You take yourself out of the mix. Another author that I interviewed was Rich
Christensen the author of The Zigzag Principle and he pointed out, he had been
involved at the time in, I think, 30 different startups, either as an owner or
a co-owner of these startups, about a third of those were wonderful successes,
he made a lot of money and made a lot of people happy. About a third were
breakeven kind of, you know, yeah, zero-sum game. The other third crash-and-burn
failures and Rich told me when I interviewed him, he learned more from the
failures than he did from anything else so let's let that move us into step
three. We're going to answer the what ifs and in step two, get to the answer that
you could handle the failure because truth is, you could. We'll talk more about
that in another video. Get to number three next. This one's easy,
do more of what works and less of what doesn't and notice, with gratitude in
your own heart that the only reason you know what works and what doesn't is
because of your mistakes. Have some gratitude there for the mistakes that
you've made. They are so valuable to you in your learning process and you're not
done yet, there's a little physiological test you can do. Put out your wrist put
two fingers right there below your thumb, see if you feel a little bump bump bump,
if you do, you're not done yet. You get another shot at this, follow the law of
frequency like Brett Harvard said. Get to your next attempt as soon as you can.
What if you knew you had to have five failures before you get
your one success? How soon do you want the next failure? See what we're talking
about? Accept it as part of the formula, wash, rinse and repeat. Do more of what
works and less of what doesn't. Mistakes? They're there for us and we can learn
from them. I make a lot of mistakes, you probably make mistakes too, we all do.
Would you be so kind as to share what you've learned from one of your mistakes right
down there in the comments. I'll promise to respond.