If at First You Don’t Succeed…Good for You!

Maybe you’ve heard or read the phrase “Success leaves clues.” Hopefully, you’re also aware that failure also leaves clues. Do you think people are paying attention to those clues?

During this current recession, the number of millionaires in the United States has dropped by 18 percent. That is a huge number.

But you can be fairly confident that those 18 percent will be just fine. In fact, they will regain millionaire status in a short time and will probably actually exceed their net worth heading into the recession. Why? Because people who achieve what must be achieved to attain millionaire status have something in common:

Successful people learn from failure. As I said, “Failure leaves clues.”

And so as the financial system as a whole (hopefully) takes some lessons away from this recession, so will the millionaires who have endured a few recent bumps. I don’t know what all those lessons will be — maybe more diversification, less speculation, lower-risk tolerances, etc. — but the millionaire mind-set will be “What has this taught me?” And they will use the knowledge re-make and then keep their millions.

Winston Churchill once issued one of my favorite quotes of all time: “Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” I think that if you can manage to view failures as lessons, then you have a much better chance of maintaining the enthusiasm that Churchill talked about.

What if you, as a baby, had completely given up trying to walk after falling the first couple of times? You’d never walk, right?

Instead, you kept getting up, time after time, until you were able to wobble around slowly at first, then eventually run. If you’ve watched a baby trying to walk, I think you’ve seen the enthusiasm from failure to failure that Churchill mentions. That baby never gives up, never loses his or her enthusiasm, despite “failure” after “failure.”

So what happens to that persistence as we get older? Why are we, as children, more persistent, more determined than we are as adults?

You have to answer that question for yourself. But part of being successful is never losing that drive you had as a child. Think about all the “failures” you have growing up — when you’re learning to walk, ride a bike, throw a ball, tie your shoes, whatever — did you ever stop trying? Chances are you can now do all those things.

Somehow, as a child, your ability to self-correct and your determination and persistence carried the day.

I think those who are ultra-successful as adults are the ones who never lose those qualities from childhood. If at first they don’t succeed, they try and try again. It’s why many millionaires have failed businesses, bad investments, even bankruptcies, in their pasts. They have these failures and they learn from them, they BENEFIT from them. Those failures enhance who they are, what they know, what they’re prepared for going forward. The failures are part of their success.

Is it difficult for you to see it that way? It really shouldn’t be. 

Even a baby can do it.