Success is in Failure

“An Over Comer predetermines that he will scale the mountain that lies ahead to its peak or that his journey will end when he’s lifeless on its face. The only thing that’s certain is he’ll never give up on what he knows to be his destiny.” By Keven Card


Across the vast book collections everywhere are books about how to be successful and become more successful but I don’t know of any book that tells us about how to be a good failure. Probably because you wouldn’t read it because we have a distaste for failure. I don’t believe success is the answer we are looking for but failure is. Yes is said it, failure is the key to success.

When you look around at the people in your city, your neighborhood or even your family, have most of them achieved great success in their lives? Or have most of them settled for being mediocre? Have you ever stopped to ask why that is? Maybe it’s because most of them don’t believe they are gifted or talented enough to achieve greatness or maybe they didn’t have an opportunity to go to college and they just got stuck in their job doing the same old thing.

I believe that the reason for the spread of mediocrity is the importance our society has placed on success. In schools across America we are taught that we are measured based on our successes but we’re not encouraged to work through our failures. In our most revered profession, Hollywood leaves us with imagery and the perception that we have to be perfect in order to matter in life. Women are elevated if they are thin and beautiful, men must be handsome and muscular and neither can say or do anything that may offend someone leaving no room for mistakes. It used to be that if we failed we were told to try, try again but today we are publicly humiliated for our failure which leaves us not wanting to take a chance.

Now, the only person I know of in the history of man who could measure up to this standard could also walk on water. But as humans being fallible is just part of life.
What makes an overcomer different is that they view success and failure differently. Most all of us have heard the story of Thomas Edison and the invention of the light bulb but what is less known about him is his definition of an overcomer. He said: Many of life’s failures are men who didn’t realize how close they were to success before they gave up. Basically the only failure is a quitter but far too often we try to overcome a situation with only a few attempts and if we don’t succeed, we give up. It’s only if we give up that we become a failure and really there are no failures there only quitters.

Our perception of failure is wrong; we view failure as some sort of limitation when in fact it’s exactly the opposite. It is an opportunity to learn what doesn’t work; make our adjustments and move forward. When Edison was berated by the press and asked why he kept working on the light bulb after failing so many times he looked up at them and said very plainly; I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that it doesn’t work. My only question to you is, would you keep going after you’d failed 1,000 times?

One of the most crucial steps in becoming an overcomer is to change our perception of failure to one that accepts and allows failure as part of the process of success. There was a time in each of our lives when we didn’t know how to walk. How did we learn how to walk? Did we just get up one day and start walking? Put you hand down you know that’s not true. We learned to walk because we fell down a thousand times but we always got back up. Success at walking was merely getting up one more time than we fell down.

Winston Churchill said: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Proverbs 24:16 says: for though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again.

The pathway to success is one of multiple failures and the will to get up just one more time.

You may be saying, that sounds good but you don’t understand I had a harsh life growing up, my parents never encouraged me or maybe you were one of the thousand who were abused and that’s what is holding you back.

I know a man who as a young boy believed that he would never be anyone important because growing up he was harshly, if not violently, punished for the mistakes that he made. Throughout most of his life his parents would say things to him and about him that tore him down, making him feel unlovable. On top of that he had also been sexually abused at a very young age. He believed that his life had no meaning and it became a destructive, self fulfilling prophesy. He was always getting into trouble, doing the wrong things. In his teens he started drinking and smoking, dabbling in drugs and all the things anyone would expect from a nobody. To deal with his emotional pain he would cut into his own flesh with a knife always a step away from going over the edge. After a violent fight with his step-dad he left home at age sixteen to live in his truck on the side of a river just to get away from his abusers. He finished high school but only because it was a requirement to go into the Marine Corps. The reason he chose the Marines was because they were the first branch of the military to go into combat where he hoped that he would be able to give his life for his country to prove to his parents that his life was worth something.

This story is played out everyday in this country and I feel their pain because that young man in the story was me. Fortunately, I never got the opportunity to give up my life in the military. Instead my perception started to change and I started to see that life was worth living when I met the most amazing women on a little island in the Pacific. Looking back, I don’t regret anything that has ever happened to me because if I had been successful as a child, I would have never went into the Marines, got stationed in Guam and I would’ve never met the most beautiful, perfect woman on the face of the earth who is now my wife of seventeen years and I wouldn’t have my two wonderful children, who bless my life every single day and I wouldn’t have one more on the way. Basically, my failures led to my successes but only because every time I fell, I always got back up one more time.

Romans 12:2 says: Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

In order to be an overcomer we must allow God to change our perception of failure, not doing so will only keep us from finding out what God’s will is for us, and God’s will is perfect, not ours. Our perception is our truth and if our truth is leading us to a path of being mediocre then we need to change our truth by allowing God to change our perception. Perception is changed by opening our minds and allowing ourselves to see things the way God sees them. If we see failure as a negative thing; then we need to open our minds to the possibility that success is achieved through our failure, making failure a process and not a limitation, which is how God intended it to be. He wants us to learn from our mistakes get back up and keep going. If that wasn’t true then when we were born we would already know how to walk. If we can we can allow God to change our perception of failure then He can start opening the doors of success for us and we will begin to see His plan for us begin to take shape. God doesn’t see you as a failure, He sees you as a work in progress and if we allow Him to transform us we can get on His perfect plan for our lives.

Success Speaks

Many a renowned authors have written on the subject of positive thinking, and the power that someone with a positive mental attitude can have in shaping their own future. Some have even tied these powerful ideas to wealth such as Andrew Carnegie and his book Think and Grow Rich, which I, myself, have found to be true. You vastly increase your chances of success by thinking positively. I’ve never heard of anyone who made his or her fortune by walking around thinking “well I guess I’m not good enough” or something along those lines. However, I’ve met so many people that think little very little of themselves, and don’t even know how to begin to change their thinking.

The secret is what you say not what you think. I know that this statement goes against the grain, but I’ve found it to be true in my own life. Several years ago, I started representing a new service in the marketplace for a NYSE company (I won’t mention any names) that had a fantastic service that was offered. I started out like a wildfire and within just a few days I had reached stardom within the company and it was great. About a year into it, I started to work with this young lady who couldn’t seem to help herself; saying the most negative and defeating things I’d ever heard in my life. Eventually, I found myself repeating the very same defeatisms she’d committed to memory. It began to take its toll on me, which resulted in my sales dropping and my shining stardom fading away, and I couldn’t understand why. It’d gotten so bad that I’d stopped functioning properly, and when I finally got the opportunity to present my service to a group (of only thirty people) fear completely enveloped me, and my mouth went so dry that my lips literally stuck to my teeth.

At first, I allowed myself to say negative things about others, and then after some disappointments, the tables turned and I began to say those things about myself. Before long, I had talked myself into being a failure. Did it happen overnight? No, it snuck its way into my life; little by little. I’m sure you’re wondering what I did to get out of that hole that I dug for myself. I started to talk myself back into being successful; I printed lists of positive things to say about myself. For example, things like ‘I’m a successful salesperson; I’m talented; I’m great at helping people. I created as many affirmations about myself as I could. Most of which, I came up with by writing down the exact opposite of what I felt about myself at the time.

This is called the perception of truth; whatever you believe to be true is true. Let me give you an example: You’re forced to work overtime at the office. You get home and give your spouse a hug or kiss; she smells the faint smell of perfume or cologne on your shirt each time you come home. You explain it with the traditional “I don’t know what you’re talking about”, which does nothing but raise the suspicion that you’re cheating. And to top it off, you were at the office alone, so no one can corroborate your story. Whether you did or didn’t cheat is irrelevant. If they believe that you cheated, then to them you did unless and until you can change their perception of that truth.

The same is true about what we believe about ourselves. In order to achieve anything in life, you have to first believe that you can achieve it; in order to believe that you can achieve you have to think its possible; in order to think its possible you have to tell yourself it is. Of course, there are other factors involved and this has its limitation— especially if you’re telling yourself something outrageous like, “I’m going to be the best NFL quarterback in history” when you’re 45 and have never played a professional sport in your life. However, within reason this will work! If you’re a number four salesperson in your company and you want to be number one; then start convincing yourself that you can be number one by telling yourself that you are. Yes, it will take time for you to get to a place where you finally believe you can accomplish what you set out to achieve, but the first person you have to convince is yourself. I dare you to write positive things down about yourself and start saying them to yourself every morning, at lunch and just before you go to bed for the next 30 days and see for yourself the difference that it can make. You have nothing to loose except the negative and that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.