"Is It Useful To Take a Positive View Of Setbacks, Misfortunes and Mistakes? by the Butterfly Marketing Team, the Most Effective Internet Marketers Today, Mike Filsaime, Paulie Sabol, Donna Fox and Tom Beal" by Ralph Zuranski
12. Is it useful to take a positive view of setbacks, misfortunes and mistakes?
Mike Filsaime: Oh yeah. To answer that directly I think we all need to learn from our mistakes. What I was talking about before about being a student of higher learning I would rather learn from other peoples successes than learn from my own mistakes. We all have to know that being an entrepreneur is that we’re going to have more failures than we do successes.
We need to be able to understand that when we have a failure that negative people are going to welcome that. Saying “Oh you see that, you tried to join that thing and it didn’t work. Well you’re still stuck here in blue collarville.”
The true entrepreneurial spirit will not allow those negative people to effect us. It will understand that we made mistakes and we can ask “What did we do wrong?” Let’s look at the success principles and see what we did and find out where we went off the tract. Then get back on the horse and try it again.
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Paulie Sabol: It is useful for me. That much I can say with absolute assurance. The reason that it is useful for me is twofold. It is the point that I made earlier about progress being my goal rather than perfection. Here’s why: if I set perfection as my goal, two things happen to me.
One, I make myself get more nervous. So the emotions, the energies that I put into place is nervous energy. It is uncertain energy. I know when I’m putting that energy out into myself, I’m decreasing the probability that I’ll have success.
It is kind of like I am combating myself. So the first reason is because setbacks are going to assuredly happen. If you try to avoid setbacks, then you’re going to strive for perfection and that is going to sabotage you.
If you are going to have setbacks, you’re going to have some misfortunes; you’re going to make mistakes anyway. You might as well view them as feedback. You might as well view them as a positive experience. You might as well view them as increasing, giving you new information to make your next plan even more probable to succeed.
Otherwise, the very worse thing might happen, which is that you might stop. Here’s what another one of the great thinkers said in this case is that the difference between someone who is unable to read, illiterate, and someone who doesn’t read is very little.
In fact the person who knows how to read and doesn’t is probably in the worse place. That’s what happens if we try to view setbacks, mistakes and misfortunes as something that isn’t positive in our life, we will be less inclined to move toward it. If we are less inclined to move toward it, we will be less inclined to move at all and we’ll miss all the opportunity.
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Donna Fox: I can tell you that I have spent a lot of money at the University of Adversity over the years. Those lessons from life’s little lessons, the hard ones that you pay with your pocket book or you pay with your pride are critical, really.
I don’t think that we change as individuals or we progress as businesses without the adversities thrown in. I don’t think we improve without the road blocks.
The trick is to figure out which things are actually adversities that we need to then react to and what are what I call obstacle illusions because they are not real. They are just fears that get in the way.
Once you master the real adversity from the obstacle illusions then you have found your key to grow as a person.
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TOM BEAL: There is a quote from Napoleon Hill that says “Every adversity carries with it the seed or an equivalent or greater benefit.” Those aren’t comforting words when you are going through adversity. They aren’t even comforting to me and I live by that quote.
But as I described some of the adversity I went through as a child I thought I was the only one going through that. As we grew up we noticed everybody has that type of stuff. Guess what, there is no such thing as a functional family, they are all dysfunctional.
Everybody has their problems. Now working with best selling authors and working with top athletes, I’m working with the “cream of the crop”. I even asked a NFL Hall of Fame quarterback, “Just because you have reached that success does that mean you don’t have any problems?” He laughed no problems? His son just died at eight years old because of a terminal illness. Try handling that problem.
One of the people I work with here is Jason Dinner. He said and which is very true “If you are in a big room with all these people and everyone throws their problems in a big pile you are going to want to get your problem out because you don’t want what the other people are going through.
Until you put it in perspective and just recognize that you are going to do the best you can with the circumstances you’re going through right now. That’s all you can do. You can worry about two things.
You can worry about things you can control or worry about things you can’t control. If you are worried about things you can control, control it and don’t worry about it. If you are worried about things you can’t control then what’s the point about worrying because you can’t control it.
So the point is if that doesn’t make sense, go get a book by Dale Carnegie called “How to Stop Worrying and How to Start Living”. Dale Carnegie wrote that in the early 1900’s because he had a lot of people coming to him that just had tremendous worry problems. If you look at society today, look at all these people on these pills to diminish the worry that they have.
I recommend reading that book. Then you understand that’s there is two things to worry about and neither one of them is not worth worrying about. It’s an awesome book! That one and “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.
You can get the double book by Dale Carnegie and it has both those in it, “How to Stop Worrying and How to Start Living” and How to Win Friends and influence People.” Those should also be recommended learning material for anybody who’s serious about becoming the best they can be in this life the brief time that we are here.
When I didn’t have much I was a student of life and going to the library. You can go the library for free. Unfortunately only about 3% of the U.S. population has library cards. But you can get all this information free. You don’t need anything.
There are stories of Og Mandino living on the park bench that went to the library and started studying and ended up becoming a multi millionaire many times over from learning. If you want success, study success. If you want happiness, study happiness.
If you don’t want to worry study how not to worry. Just like Napoleon Hill had his virtual Master Mind. He had a Master Mind with all the big wigs, F.W. Woolworth and Henry Ford. You can have all these people virtually like Abraham Lincoln and you can consult with them.
You’ve seen these bands today that people are wearing that say “WWJD?” what would Jesus do. Some people can’t grasp that but “What Would Abraham Lincoln Do?” What would your role model do in this situation?
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