FAILURE: Your new best friend…you just have to redefine it (and learn from it!)

Want to be a success in your quest to help change the world around you for God's glory? Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life! It's time we learn an essential key to success:
FAILURE

Okay, so I can tell that you are wondering: "What!!! Is this guy CRAZY!? How can you be successful by failure?"

All right, I know it may sound a little weird, but sometimes the truth is just really weird…no, seriously, it's true! Failure can be your best friend if you learn how to utilize it.

John Maxwell (THE guru on leadership), in his book Failing Forward, says that:

"You are the only person who can really label what you do a failure."

So if you think you are a failure, you will be one. If you think that by failing you become a failure, you're wrong—DEAD WRONG!!! The whole theme in Failing Forward (a great book that everyone should read) can almost be summed up by saying:

If you aren't failing, then you aren't growing; if you want to stop failing, you are in for disappointment.

So be happy! If every day you wake up to write another chapter in "A Day in the Life of a Loser," you have the wrong viewpoint. You need to start again…THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!!!! We need to change our idea of failure, and learn to harness it for our benefit (and grow, baby, grow!).

It's very important that we do our best to LEARN from our mistakes (failures). Instead of failing over and over again on the same thing, try to find out WHY you failed in the first place…and it may take a few more failures to figure that out. But if you're not afraid to fail, you have nothing to lose!

So stop being afraid of failure, and wake up to find your new best friend, Failure.

Check out John Maxwell's book, Failing Forward, for a much better coverage on this subject. In this wonderful book you'll find out how to get a hold on your fear of failure, how to change your idea of failure, how to use failure to your advantage, and a whole lot
more—all covered in the book, and I highly recommend it. It's really had a huge impact on me.

Keep on climbing, and remember:
failing doesn't make you a failure.