In this article I want to talk with you about what is perhaps the greatest success commonality and the greatest success characteristic that spans all eras.
You’ll find it all throughout Napoleon Hill’s famous work “Think & Grow Rich” the all time #1 selling motivational self help book.
Hill’s work goes all the way back to the 1930′s and before, so this isn’t some trendy success idea, although you will find it in today’s leaders in business, sports, and yes even pick-up artists.
In fact, earlier this year at a business conference I attended, where I met numerous individuals who had started with nothing and built massively successful businesses in widely different niches. One of the things I noticed about these people was an amazing ability to handle setbacks and failure, even when it reaches the level of a crisis.
They look at each instance of a so called ‘failure‘ as an opportunity to get better. In fact, you might say they look for the opportunity that the failure brings.
Yes… the greatest success characteristic is the ability to handle failure!
This characteristic is common of all super successful people – super successful pro athletes, super successful coaches, super successful business people, super successful sales people, and of course men who are super successful with women.
For example, who is it that succeeds best in sales? It’s the person who does it the same way whether it’s immediately after having made a sale or having lost a sale – the person who’s performance doesn’t deviate.
Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean if something isn’t working they keep doing it, the key point is to learn from failure. Otherwise you’ll just keep running into the same brick wall. But if you just try something once, fail, and say “well that didn’t work” and do something else completely different… you’ll never refine the skills needed to be successful. I call this searching for the “magic bullet”.
Lot’s of guys do this, and so instead of practicing a method until they have success with it, they try something a few times, and go back to reading or going to seminars till they find that ‘one magic bullet’ that makes them instantly successful with women.
When you take our workshop programs, you’ll find we teach you to do the same thing over and over when approaching women or on day-2 meetings for the same reason. We want you to get good at it by practicing it until you get success. We know you’ll get there if you just practice.
Were you to spend time observing a successful sales person, you would see this quality, and you would also find an ability to recover from failure so rapidly that an outside observer doesn’t even notice the recovery. They have developed a strategy that allows them to shake it off, learn from it, and move on to the next prospect.
Sales is a very useful analogy to pick-up for this reason.
You’ll find this process in all of the training in the Napoleon Hill books. In fact, you’ll find it in just about anybody’s book on success you want to open up, any texts, any material about being successful, you’re going to find a discussion of the necessity to overcome the adversity of failure.
Why is this so important?
Because everybody fails on their way to success. It happens. Try to find a highly successful person who hasn’t actually had more failures than they’ve had successes.
Go ahead… I dare you to try and find one!
You won’t.
So now the important question is, how do you refine this ability to handle a failure, and ideally in the blink of an eye?
There are going to be two key things you can do here:
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Study people who are successful and how they handle failure.
Determine what their strategy is that works for them.
Study them in great detail. If you’re going to read a biography by Donald Trump or Colin Powell, don’t just read it once. The book should be dog eared, cover worn, and pages filled with sticky tabs and notes.One more thing… this is important, their strategy may not work for you personally. But it will give you a starting point to develop and refine your strategy.
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Develop your own strategy.
Here’s an example of how to handle what is commonly referred to as a ‘blowout’, that we have guys do in workshop.
In case you don’t know, a ‘blowout’ is when you are talking to a woman (or group) and she says something and you don’t have a comeback. It might be something like “why are you talking to us?”
On the first night of a workshop, on the way to the clubs, we’ll tell the guys that we are having a contest, to see who can get the worst blowout of the night.
What, you ask, does this accomplish?
Simple, by making it into a game, it changes the meaning (called a ‘re-frame’ in NLP lingo) of a blowout from something that is bad and to be avoided, to something that’s expected as part of the learning process and not only that, it can be thought of as being pretty damn funny.
Being able to laugh at your failures (and yourself) takes the negative energy out of them.
Remember, you’ll need to find a strategy that works for you, and it’ll likely be different than what works for other guys. The important thing is that you do something besides wanting to give up. Find a way to keep going, because with practice you WILL get better and you will be successful.
After all, you didn’t ride a bike the first time you tried… did you?
One last thought for you on this, one of my favorite examples of ‘re-framing’ failures, two quotes by the famous inventor Thomas Edison (you know, the light bulb guy) when asked about his many failures while inventing the light bulb
“Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward…”
“Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
Keep on failing… 
Craig
Good-stuff!