Sample #4

Your Secret Weapon for Success

The secret weapon for success is practice.  It’s not a secret at all, but people seem to try every way possible to be good at things without putting in the practice, always looking for the easy road.  It just takes practice, whether that’s a special skillset, a relationship, or a math test.  Take a minute and think about that statement because it’s really true.  If you can really believe and own that, then it will change entirely the way you view failure.  We are often taught from an early age that failure is bad.  A grade of “F” on a test, for example, stands for “failure”—a person gets an F on a test and so has failed.  What a load of crap.  I’ve observed that people tend to just repeat things that they have heard without ever asking why, and I suggest that this is one of those things.  I challenge the belief that failure is a bad thing.  It’s an essential, if not the essential part of learning.  It’s just a way not to do something.  It’s just an opportunity.  There is no way to be a success without failure and failure is merely another way to practice being successful.  The fellow who finally invented the lightbulb failed hundreds of times, yet he didn’t quit.  Each of those failures was just practice for success.  Can you imagine your life today without light bulbs?  I “failed” an advanced flight test one time because I forgot to raise the landing gear after takeoff.  Big deal.  Sure, at the time I was embarrassed, discouraged, even angry, but I’ve been flying airplanes for decades and I’ve never hit anything hard.  Every plane, (except two, and there’s a couple stories there) I’ve ever been in command of has been reusable when I was finished…should I view myself as a failure or a success?

Before you can call yourself a success, it might help to define exactly what that will look like. Sometimes that’s going to be easy.  For example, if you set a goal to get an A on a test at school, it’s going to be very clear if that happened.  There are going to be times, however, when it may seem difficult to define success, such as having a “successful life”.  When asked, most people would probably struggle with that idea.  Isn’t that a bit odd?  They are living life now, days ticking by relentlessly, I’m assuming that they would like their life to be a success, and yet many would have a hard time defining what that looks like?  If you find yourself in that very situation, take some time and think about what a successful life really would look like for you.  It’s worth the time.  The average person is just a collection of days…if you live to be 90 years old, then you’ve got about 32,850 days to spend when you start your journey…if you reading this when you are twenty-five years old, you’ve already spent over 9,000 of them.  If you are thirty-five years old, you’ve got about 20,000 days left.  Doesn’t seem like much does it?  Have you defined success for you yet?  If you view each of your days as a treasured possession, as it truly is, are you happy with the way you are spending them?  Each day you trade a day of your life for something, some set of experiences.  You are paying a high price for those experiences.  You can’t get those days back.

I’ll take the liberty here of defining success as “the progressive realization toward a worthy goal”.  It’s not my definition, but it’s a pretty general definition, so I’ll take the credit for using it here.  I first heard it in an Earl Nightingale recording many years ago, so I suppose he gets the credit for it.  His premise was that a day well spent is a successful day.  A string of days well spent is a successful week, a series of weeks well spent is a successful month, 12 months well spent is a successful year, and a lifetime of years well spent is a successful life.  The point here is that success is a practiced habit.  It’s not a destination or a place to get to.  It’s the journey, the progress, the ongoing feeling that you are generally happy with how you are spending your life.  It doesn’t mean that there has to be some momentous accomplishment in your life, either, and I’d venture to say there have been many people in history who are remembered for some great achievement, but who also led rather unhappy lives.  The standard to measure yourself by is a personal one.

It’s important to note that since success is a practiced affair, you cannot experience success without experiencing failure.  In the same way that success is not a destination, failure is not a destination either.  It’s not an end result—it’s part of the practice that defines success.  It would be silly to think you can pick up a musical instrument you’ve never learned before and play it “successfully” without any practice. If you want to learn a musical instrument, you should expect to make a lot of mistakes, a lot of small failures along the way.  This concept transfers to pretty much everything you’ll ever do in life.  When you take a new class in school, it would be silly to think that you’ll know all the answers…if you did, you should be the teacher. Making mistakes in life, in class or on tests isn’t failing, it’s part of learning, and the two cannot be separated.  If you receive a test back with an “F”, the “F” doesn’t stand for “failure”, it stands for “fix it!”, or “feedback”.  That’s going to be the way of life, my friend…you’ll get lots of “fix it” and “feedback” opportunities.  You can view them as failures, or as further opportunities on your journey that is success…it’s up to you how you choose to view it, but I’ll make you this promise: you are in control of the outcome, and you have the ability to “fix it” or “forge ahead!” and to continue being a success.

Here’s a useful exercise I challenge you to do:  write down in 25 words or less what your life’s purpose is.  Start by writing down everything you can think.  Use as many words as you like. Then narrow it down to 25 words or less.  Write these on a card and keep it in your wallet, purse, or someplace where you’ll see it daily, and revise it at the beginning of every year. You’ll probably find that each day, you take at least some small step toward realizing that purpose.  I think that’s a pretty fair definition of a successful life.  I can already see you now in my mind’s eye, standing many years in the future, looking back at the course of your amazing life, thrilled with what you have accomplished.  I’m so proud of you!