What To Do The Day After Failure

What To Do The Day After Failure

September 21, 2018

Sometimes the bad guy wins.

Sometimes you end up broke and alone in a bowling alley.

Sometimes there’s no good way to spin it.

And it’s paralyzing when the only truth is a crushing loss with no hope in sight.

You’re left with sadness and one question: what am I supposed to do now?

Although it seems like nothing will ever help, there are solutions.

One, we could get angry and blame someone else. It’s her fault or the ball bounced the wrong way or the system is rigged against us.

That method works.

It allows us to wake up the next day full of righteous indignation. It allows us to walk defiantly with our head held high. It produces a constant stream of anger that can be channeled into energy used to fight our accusers.

Despite the crippling loss, we can move forward by attacking and blaming. It will get us back on our feet and give us energy.

At least for a while.

But eventually blame warfare turns sour. Allies we need will get tired of our baseless claims and turn against us. Potential sympathizers will be turned off by our belligerent ways.

And, because we know the real truth, eventually we’ll sabotage our way into another debilitating loss.

The blame game loses out in the end.

The other method we could use is to put all our focus into erasing.

No matter how bad the loss, we immediately overwrite that disappointment.

The way to stay depressed is to dwell. The constant regurgitation of misfortune keeps us forlorn.

How can we avoid that?

First, remember the goal. Whatever the goal was has not changed. The successful outcome remains inevitable. Yesterday was just one step on the path to be replaced by the next step. This is not the time to review all the things that went wrong.

In fact, there’s never a time for that.

As Wallace Wattles said when I interviewed him for my book:

“Never speak of yourself, your affairs, or of anything else in a discouraged or discouraging way. Never admit the possibility of failure, or speak in a way that infers failure as a possibility. 

Always speak in terms of advancement. To do otherwise is to deny your path, and to deny your path is to lose it.”

 

That’s why Rafa Nadal is on the court at 9 am the next morning after a big tournament. Whether he won a Major or lost a heart-breaker, he’s back on the court.

He’s always acting in terms of advancement.

That’s why he’s the greatest competitor in sports (even if he’s not the best player).

Horrible things are going to happen to us.

But if we acknowledge that and then immediately throw it aside, in the long run it won’t make any difference.

Be on the court the next morning at 9 am.

Failure has no answer for that.

 

My book is called The Inevitability of Becoming Rich, and you can find that here.