failure | Bigg Success

Addiction comes in many forms – drugs, alcohol, sex and gambling to name a few. But they aren’t the worst addiction for entrepreneurs.

Any of these addictions can destroy your life, to be sure. They can be so destructive that other people see it. They see you screwing it all up. They see you throwing your life away.

If you’re lucky – if they love you enough – they step in. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” King David said in Proverbs.

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The invisible addiction
The worst addiction makes the top of the list because no one sees it. You may have this addiction and not even realize it.

But it’s there – lurking inside your head. If left unchecked, this addiction grows like a cancer inside you and eventually consumes you.

It drives your thoughts. It runs your life. Yet you’re not even aware of it.

You think you’re being prudent. You’re thinking you’re being wise. But you’re addicted. You’re hooked on your past mistakes!

This addiction manifests itself in one of two ways:

You stop taking risks
Anybody who does anything will make mistakes. As an entrepreneur, you do much more than “anything” – you turn nothing into something. You create value in the process, for yourself and others.

You will fail from time to time. When faced with failure, the average person stops trying. They give up. They get hooked on the mistake and it drives their life from that point forward.

They don’t take any risk. They get stuck in mediocrity. They never reach BIGG success.

The cure
So many people think, “I wish I had …” or “I wish I wouldn’t have …” when things don’t turn out as planned. And things never turn out as planned.

Successful entrepreneurs think, “Next time, I will …”

So forget about your mistakes and remember the lesson. Bring your experience into your next decision. You’re stronger and wiser now. You’re better prepared for BIGG success!

You double down
Some people do the opposite. When faced with a loss, they double down.

They desperately try to “get their money back.” They stop investing and start gambling and scrambling. They’re afraid of failing. They worry they’ll be embarrassed. They will do just about anything to try to “rescue” their investment of time and money.

The funny thing is – in some cases, this turns out to be the best response. You’re not a failure until you give up. However, you may be better off focusing your resources on something else.

The cure
Remove the emotion from the situation. Seek help from people who have been there. It’s tough to know whether to push on or move on. Ultimately, the decision is yours. Let logic rule and, one way or another, you’ll reach BIGG success!

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success_and_failure Here’s a great quote by entertainer Steve Harvey …

“Don’t live by old sayings that don’t apply to you. For instance – ‘Have a Plan B.’ Having a Plan B means you believe that Plan A might fail. Having a Plan B requires that you put time and energy into what you could’ve been doing for Plan A to make it work. And if Plan A doesn’t work, guess what, get a new Plan A.”

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There’s some real wisdom in his quote. We’ll look at it line by line:

“Having a Plan B means you believe that Plan A might fail.”

Believe

He’s emphasizing how much we have to believe in success, not in failure. We have to believe, in ourselves and in our plan, in order to succeed. The first person who has to be on board with our plan – the first person who has to follow us so to speak – is ourselves. If we’re not in line, we’re in trouble!

Throw away the security blanket

There’s another thing that comes to light with this quote. Think Linus van Pelt, Charlie Brown’s best friend and Lucy’s younger brother. He never went anywhere without his security blanket.

We can’t succeed if we hold on to our security blanket, or blankets, as the case may be. We have to throw it away once and for all if we’re going to succeed bigg.

A lot of times we hold on tightly to that security blanket just in case. Just in case, things don’t go as planned.

Well, here’s the brutal truth – no matter how good we get at planning, things never will go as planned.

That’s when we have to hunker done. We have to double our efforts to make our plan work. We have to overcome all the obstacles that we will face and keep the faith.

The covenant with Nature

We must keep on believing that we will succeed because we have no choice but to succeed. When we reach that level of resolve, the forces of Nature begin to conspire with us, instead of against us.

It’s not a miracle. It happens too frequently to think of it that way.

It is no accident. Because that implies a randomness that doesn’t exist.

It’s isn’t luck because it happens more often to people whose thoughts lead to certain behaviors. The more determination we have, the luckier we get!

It’s more like a covenant. Nature says, “This is how much you have to believe. Here is what you have to let go of in order to have my blessing.”

Now, let’s look at the next line …

“Having a Plan B requires that you put time and energy into
what you could’ve been doing for Plan A to make it work.”

Setting priorities

Since we only have a certain amount of time, we can’t afford to waste it if we’re going to succeed bigg. It’s all about priorities.

We tend to think that:

we’re super-human
we can do ten things at once
we don’t need to focus on just one or two major objectives at a time

The bare naked truth is … all of that is a lie!

We do have to determine what is most important right now in pursuit of that bigg success of which we dream. Then we have to focus all our energy on only that.

In the last part of his quote, he says,

“If Plan A doesn’t work, get a new Plan A.”

So the question is, how do you know if Plan A isn’t working?

One way to judge it is if you keep running into the same wall over and over again.

You’ve tried to climb over it.

You’ve tried to go around it on one side.

Then you tried the other side.

You tried to dig under it.

You even tried to blast through it.

You’ve tried five times, but the doggone wall hasn’t budged.

Plan B is like Step 2

It may be time to start thinking of your alternatives. And here’s where we deviate slightly from Steve Harvey. Because we think Plan B is like Step 2 on your path to bigg success. You have to have a clear picture of what bigg success looks like to you before you start. Then you need to map out the steps to get there.

With your plan in place, you’ll focus all your time and energy on Step 1 before you begin to take the second step. So we’ve thought about it before we start, but we don’t worry about it until it’s time.

We think Plan B is just like that. Before we start working on Plan A, we should have thought about Plan B. We’ve prepared for the contingencies. But that’s where we stop.

And the important distinction is this ….

Plan B doesn’t send us back where we were before. Plan B moves us ahead in a way that Plan A didn’t. It makes that wall insignificant.

The only path to bigg success

But it doesn’t pay to spend too much time thinking about Plan B because the wall we face probably won’t be the wall we expect. So now we’re back on track with Steve Harvey.

Think about it a little, but don’t dwell on it. While you’re pursuing Plan A, keep Plan B out of your head. Because you have to if you want to succeed bigg.

Your mindset has to be, “This is my only path to bigg success.” By thinking that way, you will find bigg success.

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Thank you for checking in with us today. Join us next time as we begin a two-part series on the ten early warnings of a business in trouble. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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(Image in today's post by cobrasoft)