Let me just start off this video by asking have you heard of a fellow called Thomas Edison..?
I can almost guarantee you’ve heard the name. Probably some of you are thinking, “Well why do I know that name?” Well Thomas Edison is most famous for creating the light globe. There’s a very famous story getting around about how many attempts it took him to make that light globe. I think it’s a very good lesson for us in life that sometimes it’s going to take us several attempts before we get it right.
We can’t look at each of those attempts as failure, we have to look at it as learning. The myth with Thomas Edison that it took him, some stories say 10,000 goes, some stories say 1,000 goes… but if you look at the myth, it just took him a long time to get the light globe going. Let’s just use the 1,000 attempts at making the light globe as an example. Imagine you took 1,000 attempts before you got something right, or imagine you were designing the light globe. I know I probably would give it up before a thousand and I’m a pretty tenacious sort of guy. Some people would give up straightaway. But he took 1,000 goes to get it right. The media when they interviewed him said, “Mr. Edison, how does it feel to know that you failed so many times?”
He said, “I didn’t fail. I worked out 999 ways not to make a light globe.”
And I think there’s a great lesson from that, and that is rather than seeing what goes wrong as a failure, use it to build upon and use it as a learning so you get it right in the future.
That’s what I’m talking about here… Give 100% and you’ll get 100%! If you want to get 100% out of everything you do, give it 100%. I look at the only failure being the failure to participate. So if you don’t try new things, if you don’t give new things a go, the likelihood is that you’re not going to succeed. So it’s okay for things not to work the way that you expected them to. You’ve got to be okay with that. Because the reality is not everything is going to go your way, but make sure you take the learning out of it.
So for example, say you run a marketing campaign and it doesn’t work first go. Well try it again, try something different. Try a different headline until you get the headline that works. I can tell you that if you do nothing, the results going to be what? Exactly, it’s going to be nothing. So give 100% you’ll get 100%. Give 0% you’ll get 0%. Remember, the only failure is the failure to participate. You do nothing, and the result will definitely be nothing.
About the Author
Ben Fewtrell is a sought-after Business Coach, Keynote Speaker and trainer who has featured in Virgin’s Inflight Magazine and Entertainment Portal, SKY Business and “Secrets of Top Business Builders Exposed”. He is also the host of the popular Business Brain Food Podcast where he interviews leading experts on anything and everything business.