What You Must Do When You Fail

What You Must Do When You Fail

Sean: Hey, guys! Welcome back to the channel. It’s your host, Sean Si a.k.a Mr. CEO at 22. And if you’re new here, don’t let another 10 seconds pass by without you hitting that subscribe button because that is how we are able to serve you new videos coming out every week.

So today we have a special episode for you and that is how to use failures to succeed in life or work.

You see, failure is a very real part of life. I have not met a single individual who has told me, “Hey, Sean! I have never failed in life.” Hey, when we’re born we fail to clean up our own diapers so we already fail the moment we come out.

Everyone fails. But what differentiates people who are highly successful from people who just get by in life is how we handle failures. How do you and I handle our failures? That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. And I only have a couple of few points for you.

Winston Churchill is the guy who says, “Success is not final and failure is not fatal.” And we’re going to go ahead and dive deeper into what that really means.

First off, being successful is not the end. When you’re successful, guess what? Other people are out there seeing your success and they’re going to be motivated to go ahead of you or go after you. And inevitably that’s going to take you down a little bit.

And when you’re up there and you’re successful, the tendency is for you to be complacent, for you to bask in your success and think that all of your other competition is going to take a good, long while climbing up that mountain or trying to pierce that barrier to entry where you are standing on the safe side, on the other side.The moment you’re complacent, is going to be the start of you having to fail again.

But here’s the thing, success is not the end. But what takes you to success? Guess what? The road to success is paved with failures. And if you’re the kind of person who just never wants to fail, then I want you to know right now, you will find it hard to succeed because failure is an inevitable part of success.

There are numerous times that I have personally failed in life. If you didn’t know I failed 28 units in college, I should have graduated at age 19. I graduated at 21 so I added two more years of schooling for myself wherein I didn’t really do so well anyways and I just hung on by a thread.

So by and large, I consider my academic experience and journey a failure. Who would hire a guy with 28 failing units fresh out of college? Nobody. But that taught me a lot of things about failure. That failure is not the end.

That in so many things that have peppered your failure, such as me, when I failed in college, I actually got to know a lot of people in the lower batch. I had no choice. People who were in my batch graduated already, so I had to work with people in my lower batch.

As shameful as that may sound, I have met some of the best people in my life right now who have partnered up with me in business, who have partnered up with me in investments. And these are some of my businesses and investments today.

You see, I learned from my failure and I didn’t take it personally. The moment that you say, “I am a failure”, is the moment that you’re waving the white flag and you have taken failure to heart. You don’t need to do that. Instead, you can say, “I have failed.” There’s a huge difference between I’m a failure and I have failed.

Don’t take failure personally. When you say I have failed, it is suddenly now something that you can learn from. It is something that is outside of you that you can evaluate and use and move forward.

You see, in my opinion, you should only consider something a real failure if you did not evaluate it and you did not learn anything from it. That for me is a real failure.

But if you fail at something and you learn something from it, maybe something valuable, maybe something that will just help you along the way, I consider that a learning experience. And the price you paid for it, I always say it’s your tuition fee.

I’ve learned so many times and I’ve failed so many times and I have failed so much in tuition fee. And I guess that has paved the way for some of my good successes today.

Another thing that I want to share with you today, when you fail and you evaluate the experience, it creates inspiring stories for others. And you allow other people to succeed because they’re inspired by you or to succeed alongside you. That for me is the best value of you learning from your failures. You inspire other people.

Yes, success stories are inspiring. But you know what I realize? Most success stories are littered with failures. That’s how people can relate to the speakers. Whenever I speak on stage, the redemption moment of my talk is highlighted by the fact that I’ve failed so much, and people can relate to that.

In fact, if I don’t share my failures, I feel like my talk is going to be bland and boring and unreal for a lot of people. And I wouldn’t be the speaker that I am today if I didn’t fail as much.

So when you fail, evaluate the experience, separate yourself from the failure, and make it a learning point not just for yourself, but for other people to be inspired by and learn from it as well.

Something that’s easy for you to remember as I wrap up this episode is failure is the ability to turn your setbacks into set ups. Set up yourself for success.

Remember, you are able to do that by separating yourself from the failure. Don’t say, “I am a failure” or “I’m a failure.” Say, “I have failed.” Then learn from that experience, look at it, evaluate it, see what you can get out of it. You’ve paid the tuition fee, might as well learn from it and then make sure to share that story with other people so that they can be inspired as well.

Now, I want to ask you a question, and I hope you indulge me in the comment section below. And that is, what was your most recent failure? This week, last week, last month, doesn’t matter. What’s top of mind and what have you learned from it? Please share that in the comment section below and I look forward to it and I will respond to you as soon as you do.

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