Arianna Huffington describes how 36 publishers rejected her manuscript when she was 27, broke in London. She walked into a bank, asked the manager for a loan with no assets, and got it. Evan Carmichael argues that failure is how we learn, and avoiding it means playing it too safe.
Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's message is embrace failure. Over to you, Arianna Huffington.
Embrace failure. Do you remember what my mom used to say to me, which is that failure is not the opposite of success, it's a stepping stone to success. My second book, which I wrote when I was 27, was rejected by 36 publishers. I remember how devastating that felt, partly because it seemed like I had picked the wrong career and I really should do something else, and partly because I had run out of money. And I was living in London at the time, and I remember walking down St. James's Street and seeing Barclays Bank and walking in and asking to see the manager and asking for a loan. Which he gave me, even though I had no assets. And it changed my life, because it made it possible for me to hold everything together until finally I got an acceptance. But also, it made me realize that so often in life— it's a little bit like in fairy tales, when the hero or the heroine are lost in a dark forest and helpful animals appear out of nowhere to help them find their way. Well, this bank manager was a kind of helpful animal, so there are a lot of— helpful animals disguised as human beings, bank managers or whatever, who help us along the way. So approaching life with a certain amount of trust and willingness to take risks is key to succeeding.
This is such an important message for entrepreneurs because for some reason, for some reason in this society we have deemed failure to be, failure to be evil, failure to be bad, failure to be, we're so judged on something that we're afraid to go and do something again where the reality is you fail, you win. Your way to success, right? You will fail your way to success. Anything that you tried the first time, you failed that, right? You tried to tie your shoelaces, you failed. You tried to get up and walk for the first time, you failed. You tried to use chopsticks, you failed. And we have this expectation that as soon as you start in business, you're going to be successful. Where did that come from? You're gonna fail so many times, but failure is normal. Failure is good. Failure teaches you how not to do something, gives you some experience to do it better the next time. And I think the person, the an entrepreneur who tries to start a business and all they do is try to avoid failure, then they're playing it so safe that they're not taking any kind of risk. And part of being an entrepreneur is you're taking some risk, you're doing something different, you're doing something that stretches your comfort zone. That's the exciting stuff. That's where the juice is, man. And so I find a lot of entrepreneurs, they start a business and it doesn't work out, and then they fall back on, well, I'm not— maybe I'm not supposed to be an entrepreneur. I'm not meant to be an entrepreneur. Yeah, I tried it once and it didn't work out. That's not how you're gonna have success, right? That's, that's, that's just one learning curve. If you look at any successful entrepreneur— and this is a good practice and good experience, this is where I adopted my mindset— study success. Look at famous entrepreneurs, look at how they got started. There was insane failure from the beginning. They failed, they failed, they failed, they failed, they failed, they failed, and then they became successful. And that's the secret. And now it's not doing the same thing over and over and over again so you keep failing at the same thing, right? You learn, you get better, and the next time hopefully you won't fail. Even worse are the people who failed once and then they bring you down because they failed. You can't have success, right? Those are the little men. We all have the little men in our lives too. Don't be surrounded by them. Don't be that person yourself. And the next time that you fail at something, just see it as feedback. See it as a way to learn and develop. As long as you are learning from it, then it's not really failure because you've grown and you do something better the next time. So the question of the day today is, what are you failing at? Right now? Leave it in the comments below. I'm going to join the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe. And we'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. I wake up every morning with espresso, keep me going.
