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“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
-–Dale Carnegie
Most every day we come into contact with people who seem to have it all; people who live charmed lives with everything they could ever need or want handed to them on a silver platter.
But truth be told, folks who were “born with silver spoons in their mouths” are actually few and far-between.
Yes, it’s true that some people are simply born into wealthy families and thus end up living lives of luxury without having to struggle in order to succeed. But those people are the exception, not the rule.
That successful business owner with the million dollar home you pass every day on your way to work probably spent years struggling to find her way in the business world, making mistake after mistake until she finally found the key to success. And that “key” was likely a bull-headed refusal to give up after experiencing that long string of failures.
The professional athlete who earns 7 figures (or more) per year probably spent countless hours on the basketball court or in the batting cage, missing shot after shot and whiffing at pitch after pitch until they finally developed the skills and precision required to make it in the big leagues.
My point is simply this: most successful people didn’t have their successes handed to them on a silver platter. They prepared for their ultimate success by practicing, studying, planning – and most of all, by learning from the mistakes they made.
The next time you try something new and fail miserably at it, think long and hard before making the decision to give up. Success is never guaranteed, but it is also never found by those who don’t understand the value in failure.
To finish up, here’s a very interesting short video about 10 “failures” who went on to become wildly successful people.
Note: As always, you can watch this video at full screen by clicking the little “square” icon in the lower-right corner of the video after it begins playing.