Notice how beautiful and perfect everybody’s life seems online?
It looks like everyone’s “killing it” all the time. We don’t talk about failure, or how to deal with it.
So today, I want to share with you how I personally deal with failure (so it doesn’t knock me off course).
#1: Learn From Mistakes
This seems obvious, right? It’s how you avoid more problems down the road.
But… how often do we REALLY take time to self-reflect?
Life gets busy, and we end up forgetting to do it. Or, we look at our mistakes in a general way, and fail to dig into where EXACTLY we went wrong. Those details are like a roadmap helping us avoid failure in the future!
That’s why I have processes for learning from my mistakes, and they’re built directly into my business so it always gets done no matter what.
For example, after every single launch or promotion here at ASK Method, we put together what we call a Launch Debrief.
What’s a Launch Debrief? Well, it means we analyze every part of the launch we just finished… and we ask ourselves a lot of hard (sometimes embarrassing) questions. We don’t just look at what went well, but where we messed up!
By the time we’re done, we have insights into where we did well and what we need to improve for next time.
This isn’t a quick analysis either. Every Launch Debrief is a detailed, password-protected document… accessed only by my senior team. You can look at it and quickly see a bird’s eye view of what happened and why.
THIS is the kind of self-reflection I’m talking about. It’s not hard. And in the long run, you will save your business so much time and money from dumb mistakes you’re not even aware of.
You don’t just have to learn from your own mistakes, by the way. What about other people’s mistakes?
I’m always looking at what my friends are doing. I’ll even ask them. I don’t ONLY want to know their successes… I want to hear about the mistakes they made and lessons they learned.
Why? Because then I don’t have to make them later!
This kind of knowledge is so important to me, I joined Jeff Walker’s $40K Mastermind so I could compare notes with other people just like me. This has gotten huge results for my business, and saved me so many headaches.
#2: Don’t Take Failure Personally
Failure hurts. It’s rough when things don’t go the way we planned… and if we’re not careful, we’ll let failure stop us in our tracks.
That’s why it’s important to know failure doesn’t mean anything about you as a person. Failure has no consciousness to it. It doesn’t pick us out of a crowd. Failure is the direct result of our actions. No more, no less.
And while WE may feel emotional when we fail, failure doesn’t feel one way or the other about the things we’ve done.
In a way, failure’s almost doing us a favor. Because it’s impartial, it serves as a good measuring stick to let us know what’s working and what’s not.
That means we can use failure to our advantage to grow faster. I used an example above about our Launch Debriefs here at ASK Method, and how we use them to learn from our mistakes. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple (the same company he founded – ouch!) and used that time off to start Pixar.
Fact is, nobody ever built anything worth building without failing… a lot. When you see a final product you love, you never think about the hundreds (or thousands) of rounds of development it went through before its release to the public.
That’s why I don’t view failures as, well, failures. Think of them as a test. Tests help you refine your ideas and build better products.
And a year from now, you won’t be making the same mistakes, because you’ll have learned some hard lessons and improved your game.
And that’s something you should be proud of.
Now, I’m curious:
How do YOU bounce back from failure (or avoid it altogether)?
Leave a comment below and let us know!