Why Misunderstanding Failure Is Costing You Your Next Breakthrough

Is ready to hop into today's session. We're gonna talk, this is on failure. We're gonna talk about failure today.  Specifically ways to reverse and flip failure around. How many of you would say, you know, I would love to, I would love to turn what normal mortals call obstacles into fuel. 

Hopefully you want that. That's what I would like to do anyways. You can tell instantly I'm watching the US Open this weekend and like you can tell the people who thrive off of adversity versus the people who don't.  There's something about winners. It's like whether they're behind or whether there's, there's plays that don't go their way, whether they're getting bad calls, no matter what it is.

You know, football recently kicked back up. There's something about winners that they don't depend on every call being perfect. They don't depend even on momentum, they're able to play. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Whatever it is they're playing, whether they think that the circumstances are going their way or they're not.

I'll tell you this,  when you look through people's lives, the most successful of us  are oftentimes those of us who have the. Largest sized obstacles,  and if you feel like you're kind of coasting through and you don't have that much that's tripping you up or be problematic for you, then it's probably you have to look in the mirror and say, my, my vision might not be the size that it could be and should be encounter of that.

If you're going through. Seasons where it's obstacle after obstacle after obstacle is indication that you have a really big mission and there's likely a lot of resistance towards that. So we're gonna do a little bit of a study. If you're taking notes on anything that we're talking about today, you can just write on failure at the very top. 

And I'll just dive right in here. Um, the Napoleon Hill is where I'm pulling some of this literature from. And, uh, he went through an exercise where he  went back and looked at his. Past failures. He cataloged essentially the, the areas where he had failed. And I don't know if you've ever done this, but it's really interesting when, when you, when you actually go back with the intention of  examining the things that felt like failures in the moment, but they turned out to be huge wins. 

So I've got some questions for you today. This is gonna be interactive, more of an interactive type of session because I'm not, you know, documenting a person's entire life. I've just been teaching. So let me ask you this. Ha. Have you, can you think of a time in your life when something bad happens? And in hindsight, it turned out to be the best thing ever? 

Most of us were gonna say yes. Yeah,  I mean, yeah, totally. Obviously like.  Think about to, to friendships that didn't make it. And in the moment I was like, wow, nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I have no friends. It's like, wow, I'm really glad that I disconnected from, from this.  Or you go through events where it's like,  I lost my job.

Somebody fired me. I was actually, I was talking with my dad who's writing a book right now, and he reminded me as parents often do, uh, of my first job that I got fired from.  I can't imagine anybody firing me. Like, what an idiot, first of all. But they did  for whatever reason, and uh, and it was the dry cleaners.

And I was like, I was fixing something in their systems and they didn't think that it needed fixed, and so I fixed it. Then they fired me, and it turned out to be an amazing thing. I've gotten fired from jobs. I've lost great relationships. I have, I have moved cities to take opportunities that I thought was my destiny, and it turned out that it wasn't my destiny, but my God, if I wouldn't have been in that city, I wouldn't have had the next opportunity and I had to be in the city.

You, you know what I'm saying? Like. We get so obsessed with the opportunity itself for the thing that we think we want, without realizing that when you, when you disconnect and you just do this, you let go.  Life has a way of positioning you perfectly. I.  For whatever the next thing is.  And so Napoleon sits down and he looks back at his life and he goes through every single failure  that he felt like we're catastrophic and existential at the time.

But with the perfect lens of hindsight, he's able to see.  These were not failures, these were wins. I did not lose something. I was protected from something. I wasn't moved backwards. I was repositioned. You can reframe them when you're looking backwards. The past exists to serve your definition of the future.

Well, don't have time to get into that right now, but this is where the exercise, you should do this about once a quarter, I think, and just look back. Flip the lessons. Flip the failures into lessons. If a, if a failure is not a failure, but it's a lesson.  It doesn't sting as bad. And so he is sitting down  and he has seven of them, and we'll talk about them today.

There's a couple of quotes that I wanna share with you before we even get into them because I think that they're, uh, they're really appropriate is sound. He says, sound character. Sound character. What is sound? Character? This means character that has proper infrastructure. It has the right materials and the right puzzle pieces are fitting together.

So a person's character, which by the way is bigger than just one area of their life character's foundational. Character covers every single aspect of a person's life, relationships, business, decisions, et cetera. He says, sound character is usually the handiwork of reverses and setbacks, and temporary defeat,  reverses, setbacks, and temporary defeat, which the uninformed part of the world calls failure. 

And I want to draw a distinction real fast. When he says uninformed,  don't think he's meaning uneducated. I think he's talking about uninformed. And how do you become a con? How do you be? How do you get yourself informed? You sit down and you properly look backwards.  So everyone is like a fan in this crew, at least of the morning formula. 

And how do I set my future? How do I look towards the future? How do I create the future? But we're not, look, we're not doing a good enough job looking backwards and reminding ourselves even at a subconscious level that everything that hurts in the moment prepares us in the long term.  It's something you have to learn how to do. 

And so I've been, you know, basic tactical, so I've been journaling every day for, since like 2013. My first journal entry ever is a picture of a brand new puppy.  Me and my wife got, we were in a 650 $700 apartment in Cordova, Tennessee. It flooded every year and I was so thankful for that puppy and for our apartment, and we were living on our own.

And our lives legitimately sucked, but it was our lives and I was grateful for it. And when I'm able to look back and see this is where I've come from, it gives me staying power for whatever it is I'm going through right now is in the moment you feel like you're physically gonna die.  Like if you're going through failure right now, you just feel like you are just gonna die.

But you, when you look backwards, you get staying power. There's another quote  he says often. He says, these are lessons that can only be learned through defeat.  Some lessons you only learn by getting beat.  So once again, talking about these tennis players and um.  You can tell that they have won so much and lost so much that they don't really care.

They, they're connected to them playing the best game that they can. They're not necessarily connected just to the outcome. They're disappointed. Sure, but some lessons you can only learn through the feed and the players who have lost the most, even if it only in practice, they're the ones who are best at playing.

What looks to be a failure was nothing more than a kindly unseen hands That halted me in my chosen course.  And with great wisdom forced me to redirect my efforts along more advantageous pathways. Think about this right now, just this is private, personal. You don't have to put it in the chat, but I want you to write it down somewhere else.

Think of at least one scenario  where  you were trying to achieve something, and if you would've achieved that thing, you would've missed out on something really, really, really important to you. 

This is what he's talking about. What? What looked to be a failure was nothing more than a kindly unseen hand That halted me in my chosen course, and with great wisdom forced me to redirect. I.  My efforts along a more advantageous pathway.  So there's, every single person on this call has this experience where you have tried to do something and because it didn't work, you met somebody because it didn't work.

You got repositioned somewhere else because it didn't work. You learned something that you wouldn't have had had time to learn prior. You've been redirected in a more advantageous pathway. And this last quote, before we get into the lessons,  he says, I arrived at this decision only after, only after I had taken a retrospective view of my experiences and had analyzed them in the light of many years of sober and meditative thought.

What's, what's the point of this quoting here? It means you're gonna have to work a little bit for this, sorry.  There's no cheat, cheat, cheat, easy bake options for you pulling lessons from your failures. You're just gonna have to sit down and do it. If you're too busy to retroactively examine this types of, of, of material, you're too busy to succeed.

That's the bottom line. And so as leaders, we have to find time for this. We have to find time to sit down.  And examined backwards just like we do when we examined Fords in the future. So his first turning point. His first turning point, he has  a job as a stenographer and a bookkeeper. I. His first turning point, he's got a job as a sonographer and he keeps this job and he is a bookkeeper for five years.

And, um, he's moving up and he is feeling good and is employer, the person who he works for, um, loses his fortune and has to close down the business that he has to find something different. So he says that. This failure felt really bad in, in the short term because he had lost his job. If you've ever lost your job, it's a pretty unfortunate situation or scenario.

But his next job that he only would've found if he needed the job, we realize that like we, we, he, Napoleon only goes into this next job because he loses the last job.  How simple is that? Just basic. But how many We never think about it. We're like, well, he never would've.  You never would've moved into the next opportunity if you were obsessed with the last one.

So his next job is a sales manager. He gets a sales manager position at a large lumber company and he starts advancing.  You gotta think. Napoleon Hill's a very outspoken, confident type of person, and uh, he's.  Pretty much willing to just do whatever. And so he starts advancing because when you find people who have the chemical makeup of like, they'll just do stuff and they'll operate outside of even what they feel they're paid to do, and they'll just kind of take over.

You're like, let's promote this person. So he gets promoted, but he starts feeling like he's indomitable and he writes this, he finds this in his letters and journals, and he's talking about this. He's like, I started feeling on top of the world, and this is the quote he writes at the end of his life. To stand on the top of the world gives one a wonderful sensation.

But it is a very dangerous place to stand unless one stands very firmly  because the fall is so long and hard if one should stumble.  So this is the first time that Napoleon starts. I. Piecing together a familiar pattern that, and we know this today, this is a very e everybody's, have you seen this chart where it's like the up and down and up and down and up and down the life of an entrepreneur And everybody thinks it's a straight line from the left to the right, but what it really is is you get up, you fall and almost die, but you don't, and you hobble up the next one, then you fall and almost die.

He is what I'm talking about.  

Oh yeah. 

So this is kind of, this is basically the first,  um, representation of that where he is like, yo, it's.  I'm noticing a pattern here,  and the pattern is when I get to the top of the hill, I fall off of the hill  and, and he incorrectly.  Attributes. This is like watch out for standing on the top of the world.

And this is just because in my opinion, Napoleon doesn't have, he doesn't have access to neuroscience, he doesn't have access to the brain's pattern recognition machine. They don't really understand neuro neurons. They don't, they don't really understand, um,  mimetics. Like Met desire. And so we're reading this from a guy who's obviously Napoleon Hills World famous, but they don't have access to the same level of, of mechanics and biology and uh, the training that we do.

And so he says that  to stand on the top of the world is a wonderful thing, but it's a very dangerous place to stand. I think that that's probably false. I think what he's talking about is like, Hey, for some reason, every time right before  I.  Fell off of the top of the mountain. I was up on the mountain.

Well, this is more of an issue of physics than it is identity. Does this make sense why? I'm trying to correct parts of the, of the narrative. If you go and read this, he says, up until that time, and this is his second turning point, up until that time, it had never occurred to me that success could be measured in terms other than money and authority.

This is more of the attribution for why he's failing. He's about to fail.  Is, is actually an improper definition of success, and so watch out when your definition of success begins slowly tilting  and you find more meaning in the Rolex  than you do Monday morning getting to the office. Just watch out for this. 

Because it happens so subtly and it happens very quickly. All of a sudden, if you're flying private, you feel like you have succeeded. If you're flying commercial, you do not. If you have a nice house, you feel like you have crushed it. If you do not, you do not watch out for this little, little distinction, which basically says that I am more addicted to the prize than I am the process, because that's actually the real attribution for when you're about to probably  fall down.

Mountain.  So he is doing this stuff. He's crushing it. All he cares about is money and authority, and he's at the top of the mountain. And then 1907 hits anybody. Remember what happened in 1907? There's a big financial panic and he crushed the business and he resets all the way back to zero. Now, I don't know what Napoleon Hill was doing with his money, but it's very clear to me that he wasn't actually doing the right thing with his money.

He was probably spending it.  Stuff. 'cause he keeps talking about I was reset back to zero. Well, it is. Every time you get reset, you should actually reset back down to zero. 

That's not the, it's not the goal.  No. Yeah,  it's like, let's talk about last year. Let's, let's talk about this. For me,  I went from a,  you know, booming companies, the end of 2021  and I.  They began to decline. I did not know how to keep them from declining. I did not know how to  protect them. Even after I had moved on. 

There have been areas where I'm like, oh my God, I am literally  factually broke.  I'm actually not broke. I'm not resetting to zero, but I'm resetting back to a level that I no longer feel comfortable with because of my experience. But, but keep this in in mind. Every time you reset, your baseline should bump up a little bit. 

And so the, the thing about the mind is that if somebody goes from making a million dollars a year to $2 million a year.  What does it feel like? Incredible. Euphoric. I'm rich. I never have to worry about money again. But if you go from $10 million a year down to $7 million a year, you feel like you're physically dying. 

It's a regression that human beings hate more than the actual level or the actual number. We hate, we hate, we hate regression. So I don't know if he's talking about here, did he actually reset back to zero if he did? He doesn't know what he is doing or if he just felt like he was being reset.  But the moral of the story, uh, if the story is that he's being reset, and he says that the, the 1907 panic basically took away his job.

Um, it completely, but it completely diverted his efforts  from the lumber business  to the study of law. Let's just draw an interesting distinction for a second. Let's talk about identity. How many of you have made the mistake of tying your identity to what you do? 

Super American way of like doing stuff.  Hey Mike, I'm Taylor. What do you do? What do you do? I was just gonna say, yep. What do you do? What do you do? One of the first things that comes outta people's mouths. It's like all we care about. What do you do? What do you do? Yeah, what do you do? And we judge the race based on what, what do you do?

We judge the status based on what do you do? We judge, we judge people based on like, well, do you do something cool? Do you not do something cool? And as if you don't do something cool, then you must be a failure, because what you do is who you are. It's no, no, it's a heuristic. That we have to watch out for.

And so Napoleon Hill is like,  he's like,  how many of you have had like a, a business and something and you're like, this is what I'm called to do and I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life. And I'm be the biggest and bad baddest everywhere. Well is be careful not to tie too much of your identity into what you do, but I rather let what you do come out of what your identity is.

Say who you are. This is why we have values training inside the morning formula stuff. You know, we didn't used to have that.  We've added it because it's important for you to know who are you,  and then as a byproduct of that, what do you do? So he, he gets outta the lumber business  and he has his, his efforts redirected into the study of law,  and he's an automobile salesman.

During the day he's going to law school. At nights, he's pulling double duty.  You can't escape this. There are gonna be seasons of your life where no matter what, you are pulling double duty. Some of you triple duty  and there's nothing wrong with you for pulling double duty. I think that sometimes we have to watch out for the pendulum swings.

You have some people who are online who are like, man, you should just grind every day. Work on Saturdays, work on Sundays. Don't be poor. You have some people who are like, man, I just love one person. Businesses and lifestyle brands.  Whatever it is that you feel you should be doing as a result of who you are, that's what you should be doing.