Failure! Such a scary word. Many of us exert a lot of energy to avoid failing. And, why not? It can seem like failure is everywhere. After all, 45% of businesses fail during the first five years, and only 25% make it to 15 years or more. Only 33% of students attending public colleges graduate in 4 years, and after six years, the rate is still only 57.6%. 69.3% of the population earns less than $100,000 a year. When we spend time avoiding failure, we put our focus on failure instead of success.
Failures are short-term responses to risks taken. We realize long-term visions with enough perseverance and focus. To seek success instead of failure, we need to chase the long-term gain regardless of the short-term failure.
Here are four ways to focus on our success instead of our failures:
Build a big vision and write it down. Build your business, your team, your career, and your life as part of a long-term vision. Take the time to think big and look at the long-term story of what you want your business, your life, and your legacy to be.
Establish goals and milestones. What are your long and short-term goals, and what do you have to do to achieve them? Where do you want to be in 5 years? Are you on track?
Segment our market. Are we trying to be all things to all people? That’s a pretty tall order, and it inhibits us from connecting with our authentic audience. When we understand who we are and who wants what we have, we have more success focusing on that segment and forgetting about the rest.
Focus on the strategy. We need to regularly work on our businesses, relationships, teams, and lives instead of living in them. What gets measured, gets managed and when we have strategies to achieve our goals, they work well.
All of these strategies are long-term ways to seek success. We keep our focus on the long-term vision; it’s almost impossible to fail. Each time necessary, we pick ourselves up, learn a lesson and move one step closer to achieving our dream.
