Why it’s good to FAIL

Failure is really only feedback from our environment or the universe telling us that our response to various events in our lives was not correct.  What that in effect means is that our responses did not deliver the outcomes that were desirable at that time. So failure really only serves as an opportunity for us to learn and grow and to find different responses in the future, that will deliver the outcomes we desire. 

Research has shown that when venture capitalists invest in some high risk new business ventures the average success rate of these business ventures is as low as 3 %, when the business owner is under the age of 40.  The success rate goes up to 76 % when the same ventures are driven by individuals over the age of 55.  The only difference between the two groups is age or in real terms experience. The older group has failed more and therefore has learnt better responses to each event and therefore gets far better and consistent outcomes.

I have noticed that successful people fail far more often than unsuccessful people. The most important thing to understand about failure is that it is only feedback, maybe not the kind of feedback we want, but it is only the universe not delivering the outcome we want or expect.  Successful people have a very simple response to failure, NEXT.  Failure is an opportunity for us to learn, grow, develop, gain more knowledge or simply search for better responses that will deliver the outcome we desire. Failure is never a reason for us to wallow in self-pity or a reason for us to give up.

We don’t consider ourselves successful if we can get our shoes on in the morning, because that is easy and predictable.  We only define people as successful, who succeed in areas with low rates of success.  Rest assured, whether the people that we look up to were creating a beautiful painting, writing a piece of music, writing a best seller, or raising a child, there is no doubt that somewhere along the line they failed in one or some of their endeavors.  Never let failure or negative feedback from your environment stop you from taking the action you need to succeed. 

The really great entrepreneurs amongst us have an incredible ability to fail fast, learn the lessons offered and armed with this knowledge, they move onto the next opportunity. So if you want to succeed in any new venture, be willing to fail, in fact expect to fail many times along the way, learn the lessons offered as quickly as possible, by spending as little time as necessary licking your wounds and get straight back in the saddle, armed with new knowledge and skills. Each failure, roadblock or challenge along your journey to success, does not only bring you closer to the success you desire and deserve, it teaches you invaluable lessons too. Lessons, which will equip you to not only make better and better, more sound decisions and choices going forward, but will also often help you to identify opportunities, which may have remained hidden, had you not encountered the challenge.

“Successful people fail much more often than unsuccessful ones” 

Satisfaction Thrives on Challenge

If you have ever played a computer game where you always win, you soon lose interest and discard the game.  When the game is challenging and allows you to win sometimes and loose periodically, you remain interested and you work at improving and growing.  In fact loosing actually makes playing the game addictive and makes you want to improve. 

Our satisfaction levels thrive on challenge, the moments when life gets the most difficult is where our brains produce the most Dopamine (a neurotransmitter that governs reward and learning in our brain). The pleasure center of our brains is most active when our brains are almost too challenged to succeed.  We are programmed to actually need failure in our lives to fully enjoy our successes. 

How to turn the Negative into Positive

When you are faced with any outcome in your life that is unacceptable (Failure), take the time to say “Oh Well” instead of “Oh No”.  The key to really turn any apparent failures into successes is to understand the difference between the actual outcome we did not want and any additional and unnecessary thoughts we have about the outcome.  For example you lose the job/race/relationship.  Your response, I am a looser, my life will be terrible going forward and everyone will hate me.  These are all additional thoughts that have nothing to do with the here and now; they have nothing to do with the actual failure.  In reality all you lost was the race, job or relationship. All the additional negative thoughts you introduced, by thinking negative thoughts, is all based on hypothetical thoughts, which will probably never happen. Why think negative thoughts or invite more challenge into your experience, after facing any less than ideal circumstances.  

When faced with any failure in your life, acknowledge the failure, feel the disappointment, for the shortest time possible and move forward.  Go through a little grieving cycle and allow yourself to feel the hurt, but do not wallow in unnecessary self-pity, which does not serve you at all.  If there is anything to be learnt from the failure or how you could do it differently next time, just learn it and then have the courage to move on. Don’t get bogged down in creating perceived extra outcomes or future outcomes, which have nothing to do with what has actually happened.

Most suffering comes from our thoughts and not from the actual event itself.

We are conditioned from very early on to define certain things as failures and others as successes and we then create a belief system around these definitions, which define us. 

For example: If I only give myself a perfect score, when I feel worthwhile and everything is going according to plan and if I fail, I am worthless. I am setting myself for disaster. As you know, nothing ever goes exactly according to plan. There are always challenges, setbacks and disappointments. So if my measure of feeling worthwhile is based on my need for a constant ebb of positive outcomes, I will persistently live in a place where I do not feel worthwhile.

You are a truly magnificent being, who lives in a world with challenge. The challenges you face are here to help you grow, never to make you feel worthless. Once you recognize that you are only reacting to a thought, a conditioned response instead of anything real, then it becomes really easy to use positive self-talk to tell yourself to react to the event and not to create any additional negative outcomes.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Pursuing happiness is as effective as chasing a rainbow

Attempting to pursue happiness is as effective as attempting to discover the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The harder you try to find happiness, the more you pursue it, the further out of your reach it will become. Happiness is never something you pursue; it is something you choose to enjoy, because of internal feelings of contentment and meaning. It is a state of mind, you can choose to invite into your experience at any time. If you allow your happiness to depend on factors outside of your control or things in your environment, over which you have little or no control, any small change in your circumstances or in your environment, will result in changes to your state over which you have no control.

I am sure that enjoying a delicious ice cream will make you happy. The challenge though, is when you allow that ice cream to be the catalyst for your happiness. What happens if someone, accidently knocks the ice cream out of your hand? Do you immediately change your state, from happy to angry? If you are outward looking for your happiness, it will be fleeting and temporary. The art of enjoying positive feelings or sustainable happiness, which is not dependant on any extraneous factors, is to find meaning and ways of inviting fulfilment into your experience. 

When you invite meaning and fulfilment into your life, you will have discovered a way of feeling happy and content, despite any changes in your circumstances or any small mishaps, which may occur. A life of meaning, where you have a deep sense of purpose and value, will most certainly never change, because someone knocks an ice cream out of your hand. When you have meaning and you have invited fulfilment into your life, you are living in a state of joy and happiness, which is not dependant on purely fleeting emotions.

Action Idea: Start to explore your environment and try discovering areas where you can find meaning and fulfilment.

• Try to discover ways of developing deep meaningful connected relationships with people around you
• Look for a cause larger than you, which you can support.
• Make a contribution to others, with no expectation of receiving anything in return.
• Look for and discover all the wonders, which are in your life right now and feel real gratitude for them.
• Commit to a life of on-going learning and growth, as you grow and become more, you will invite far more meaning and fulfilment into your experience.

Try to bring one or all of these factors into your experience, you will be amazed at how they will contribute to your feeling of contentment and bring meaning into your experience. The most wonderful side effect of working to bring any of these concepts, I have described above, into your experience, is that as wonderful as it is to cross the finish line in each case. The journey, which you must travel to invite this level of meaning and fulfilment into your experience is almost magical.

One of the easiest ways to immediately change your state and to begin your journey towards meaning and fulfilment is to explore your life and find all the wonders in your life, for which you are grateful. When you take the focus off you and place it on all the positive things you have in your life to be grateful for, you immediately feel more positive an upbeat. Gratitude helps you to wash away all the fear and anxiety. You cannot feel gratitude and fear and anxiety at the same time.

So whenever you are looking for ways to invite happiness into your life, simply change your focus off everything, which may be wrong and instead think about all the wonderful things you have to be grateful for in your life. Another way to invite happiness into your experience is to do something special for someone else. Any selfless act will bring buckets of happiness, contentment and fulfilment into your life. Why not give it a whirl, living a life of meaning and fulfilment, is such a satisfying place to live.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

You can Change your future by changing your vision of what is possible

Let your mind out for a walk today and explore the question “what do I really want in my future?” When you gain clarity around this issue, you become a creator of your circumstances. Continue to blunder, blindly through life and you will remain a creature of your circumstances. For you to finally begin to manifest your true aspirations, you must clearly articulate these aims to both yourself and the universe. When you clarify your aspirations, they take on a new substance and what was a mere wish, before becomes real and achievable.

No matter how good your eyesight may be, it will be of little value if you do not have vision. This is your ability to see things that may be invisible to other people or to innovate and see things that may not even exist yet. The limitations we face in life are not due to our current circumstances or abilities but rather by our vision of what is possible for us. True vision is the ability to create pictures of what can be, it is a place where we appeal to our better selves, a place where we appeal to that hidden self and we strive to become more.

We are visual beings that do not only see with our eyes.  The building that you are sitting in right now was just an idea in someone’s head at one point. They then developed a clear picture of exactly what they wanted to create. This was then converted into a blue print and then built into the structure you are now sitting inside. The way to create the future of your dreams is to first create a vivid picture of what you want, a clear vision for the future. Then to create your own blue print ot make that happen. As you think it, you must commit to ink it. The size and scope of your future is only limited by your ability to envision it. Set your mind free and allow it the freedom to walk boldly into your future and see clear pictures of your dreams and fantasies. Commit to then clarify these and then create a blue print for your success.

Your future will turn out exactly the way you see it. Nothing will happen or ever has happened without someone first creating a vivid picture in their mind first. Begin today to start painting a better vision for your future. No matter what may have happened in your past, the slate for your future is spotless. You can paint any picture you can see onto this blank canvass. All the choices are open to you right now. You get to choose everything that you put into your picture of the future. Do not limit yourself by thinking small. It takes as much energy to dream small dreams that will hold you from your potential as it does to have huge dreams. Select the image you want for your future by searching deep within yourself and allow your mind to wander unfettered by logic or what you believe is possible for you right now.

Begin painting your picture for your future by exploring what is possible for the remainder of this year. Then begin to see bigger and bigger pictures form in your mind, as you allow yourself to stretch and expand into a worthy vision that will push you beyond your current comfort zone. Paint a grand picture of what is possible. It is widely accepted that we significantly over estimate what we can achieve in a year and that we dramatically underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Take a longer view of all the possibilities that await you in the future and dare to dream big dreams.

Live in the moment, never allowing your dreams to run ahead of you, for the person that only looks outside of themselves is simply a dreamer, those that learn to look into their heart, awaken their belief in their ability and they unleash their unlimited potential. Recording and time defining your dreams is simply the start, realizing them is the art

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Stop Attempting to Solve Problems Any Longer – Just Make Different Decisions

Working with the concept of problem solving, introduces a number of challenges for me. I believe that what we think about, we most certainly, through our thoughts and actions, eventually bring about. So the very act of viewing something as a problem causes us to engage in negative thought processes. These negative thought processes sees us approaching any event which has occurred from a very negative standpoint. We view the event as something we need to overcome, rather than simply an event, which has occurred that, is not aligned with the outcome we want to achieve.

When you make this shift, where you no longer view any changes that you need to make or events, which are not aligned with the outcome you want to achieve, as problems, you remove the negative connotation associated with overcoming problems. You instead allow yourself to operate from a far more positive position. This subtle shift then allows you to view these changes or undesirable outcomes, which you need to make, as merely a set of different choice or decisions away. This subtle shift, will allow you to operate from a more positive position. You no longer have to overcome anything, all you need to do is make a few calculated and focused different decisions or choices and the outcome or result will change.

My experience has shown that once you make this shift away from viewing any undesirable result, as a problem you need to overcome. Instead you see it as an event which is not aligned with the outcome you want to achieve, you immediately remove the feeling of overwhelm and move into a proactive position, where you feel empowered. It is obviously far easier to make meaningful, appropriate decisions, when you are operating from a positive modality, where you feel underwhelmed. Rather than from a pressured position of overwhelm, as you tackle a problem and try you overcome it.

Change the way you look at problems and the problems will change into manageable, undesirable events, which can be altered, by simply making a few different choices or decisions. Now that you know that there is no such thing as problems, it is time to offer you a few tools to help you make better decisions. The better and more informed your decisions are, the better will be the new outcomes you will be able to achieve.

This dynamic environment we live in often requires us to make decisions, very quickly.is. The rapidly changing world we live in means we are expected to make high quality decisions almost in an instant. Deciding and acting is always the responsibility of the leader in any business. It has however become very challenging leaders to make any decisions, because of the dynamic nature of the business environment, with far more inputs and a myriad of interdependencies.

This challenge is exacerbated by the way data is presented. Reports are designed to inform, rather than to provide insights. These reports are designed to report by category or to merely offer metrics. This way of presenting data was effective, when there were fewer connections between data. This meant that there was a small gap between having information and utilising this to make any decision. The dynamic nature of the business environment and the ever shifting and changing world, has now resulted in a huge gap forming between the available information and its effectiveness as a decision making tool.

For Example: It is important to know the consumer buying habits and patterns in any market. The current way of providing reports as used by companies at the moment, only provides metrics, there is no provision made to consider crucial factors such as strategy, core competencies and the company’s competitive position. Strategy, core competencies and the competitive position of any business are the key factors, which drive any decisions, which need to be made.

It is for this reason that the current way of providing reports, where only metrics are presented, should be revised to include more relevant information around core competencies, strategy, market conditions and competitive position. It is no longer adequate to provide discrete facts, it has become crucial to provide meaningful information, which provides real answers. The information should be prepared to provide data relative to the decision, which needs to be made or that provides actual answers to crucial questions, needed to make great decisions.

For Example: most scorecard reports are designed to list categories. They list each metric, their current level of performance and then this compared to some sort of historical data. All this information is useful in certain contexts, but does not reveal the real information you need to know, when looking at a scorecard. Your goal when exploring any scorecards is most certainly not to be informed about targets, performance or history. Your role as a leader is to have meaningful information, which will give you the necessary background to allow you to create a plan and to take action. If reports are prepared with the result in mind, they will be far more effective and provide a meaningful support mechanism to any leader.

Obviously when you review a traditional report detailing categories and metrics, you will go through the report line by line. As you try to absorb all the data overwhelm, your brain will be trying to compare this data with previous information, which you have encountered and it will be filtering, eliminating and removing potentially crucial information, simply because of the information overload. We look at the data overload and try to answer the same question as we progress down the report, line by line. “Is the metric on target and what is the trend telling me”? This is a really ineffective and inefficient way of analysing data. Why ask the same question, repeatedly, when you can organise the data to allow you to discover the info you need to allow you to make any decision.

Rather create a decision or outcome driven report. This way you only present the crucial or relevant data, which you need to use to make the decision. You organise the metrics according to the question you need answered or the decision you need to make, rather than the data being organised on the report in terms of the metric, with no thought about the decision you need to make. This simplified way of analysing only the data you need, in a way that answers the question you need answered or the decision you need to make simplifies the process and allows you to get a clear picture.

This will allow you to immediately know where to focus your attention. This focused approach eliminates the need to wade through unnecessary rows and rows of repetitive data, which only overwhelms the reader. When you organise the data according to the focused approach as defined above, there is no need to wade through reams of data to get the answer. This organised, decision driven approach provides all the answers you need. The raw numbers are irrelevant, all the reader is interested in is what the numbers or trends mean and what action is required.

This approach allows you to very quickly get the answers you need and to track only the trends you need to be observing. Of course you can still analyse the raw data and use the numbers, if necessary to further understand or diagnose any challenges. The raw data or metrics are merely an input; they are not the answer you are looking for. So having all the numbers on any report, will actually just slow you down and even force you to become overwhelmed and overloaded. Too much data on any report is difficult to analyse and will result in your brain filtering or ignoring crucial information.

Action Idea: Think about all the reports you utilise to assist you when making any important decisions. Are you asking and answering the same questions on every line or even if you have become more organised and have adopted a colour coding scheme to highlight and track certain issues. Does the report actually answer the questions you have around the decision you need to make. To make the reports you use in future really effective, where they will serve as a powerful decision making tool. Organise the report to answer the real questions you have and simplify the process, by using the process I described above.

When you are rethinking how you can utilise the data you need in future, to assist you to make meaningful decisions, you need to make. Will require a major shift to the way you have operated in the past. Your historical practices of analysing, reading and attempting to analyse rows and rows of metrics, will most certainly not serve you going forward.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za