failure – Alphadog Success

Drop The Past: It Doesn’t Deserve Time In Your Future

Your past doesn’t define you. I can’t even tell you how many people I come across who say, “I’m a failure”. “I don’t have it”. “This suck”. Life sucks. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Every single year, I get poor. I’m stuck. These people are not low IQ individuals, per se. They’re not ugly. There’s nothing in their personality that makes them inferior. It’s their attitude that dooms them to a life of mediocrity, struggle, and frustration. If you’re reading this article, chances are you’ve felt these things. Maybe you’re feeling that your life follows a pattern where one day is basically the same as the day before it. Like Groundhog Day with Bill Murray (great movie by the way). There’s really not much change in your life. Before you know it, you feel that you’re stuck in a rut that you call life – and there’s no escaping. It’s as if the script keeps playing over and over. It’s the same boring old movie again and again. Same movie, different day. All arriving at the same the conclusion – death. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I know it sounds kind of extreme, and depressing. It’s definitely discouraging. But, I want you to understand where that mindset leads to. And this definitely doesn’t lead us to a happy place. If there was any doubt before, now you have the answer. People who screw up in the past think it seals the rest of their life. Your past doesn’t define you. This world would be a vastly different place if that were the case. No matter how bad you screwed up in the past, it doesn’t have to hold you back unless you let it. When you keep repeating scenes in your head of being rejected, humiliated, embarrassed, betrayed or oppressed. Your subconscious will attempt to bring that into existence. Plus you are feeling all of the emotions as if you were living through it live. Finally this causes you to vibrate at a lower frequency, attracting more of the same. What do you think happens when you repeat this behavior? Your past doesn’t define you. Do you think you can change the material fact of what happened in the past? No. It’s not like the movie Back to the Future and you’ve got a flying DeLorean that you can jump into with Marty McFly. It doesn’t work that way. What happened in the past happened. What you can change is your interpretation. Your past doesn’t define you. You can change its effect on you in the here and now. Claim your power. This is key to external change, which is affecting what is happening for you right now, your appearance, your work, your business, the amount of money in your bank account, or how big your house or apartment is. All across the board is an internal change. Change your relationship with your past and you can change your future. Does your past condemn you? Does it make you feel small, weak, and powerless? Well, you can change how you interpret your past. Internal changes mean changing your thought patterns, assumptions, beliefs, and emotional habits. It’s perfectly true that the world doesn’t care about your feelings, it cares about your actions. It aims at results. Where do you think those results come from? It comes from your thoughts. When you think about your situation in a certain way; you end up in an empowered emotional state. In that new emotional state, you ask smarter questions and make corresponding decisions. When you make those decisions, you change your present and future with your actions. What if you can change your thoughts? What if you can change your assumptions about your past? Your life doesn’t have to feel like a runaway roller coaster where the moment you think about something negative, everything has to end up with a negative implication again and again and again. It doesn’t have to be that way. Please understand that you are always in control because you can always choose how you interpret things. You can always choose what you think about. You can always choose what you do or do not dwell on. Do not let go of that power. That would be the height of irresponsibility and I hate to say this because when I first realized this, it was when somebody said it, and it stung a little bit. That was precisely the point things changed though because at that point I grew. Whatever is happening in your life, you’re doing to yourself. You really are. I know it doesn’t make much sense. Who wants to intentionally live a frustrated or unfulfilled life? Who wants to feel this pain? Take responsibility. You can do it. Change creates change. Your past doesn’t define you. Reacting the same way to past situations will only keep you bound to the lesson and stuck in the same karmic loop. When you are presented with the same situations over and over, you have to do something different. You are being presented with two choices, evolve or repeat. ~Wishing you success!

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Successful People Aim To Fail Quickly

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Why in the world would somebody want to fail quickly?” You may have read the article title and did a double take….“Isn’t failure something we’re supposed to avoid?” “Isn’t it something we’re supposed to run away from?” “Isn’t it a mark of embarrassment or even humiliation?” Why in the world would successful people, of all people, aim to fail quickly? You should understand that successful people know failure is always a possibility. So, they don’t candy-coat it, try to avoid it, or make up excuses for it. They also don’t try to cover it up with rationalizations, excuses, or justifications. Instead, they look it straight in the eye and address it. Failure is inevitable, suffering is options. Maybe, it’s monetary…or maybe, it’s social like a loss of reputation. Whatever the case may be, failure conventionally means pain and/or suffering. Successful people realize that failure is inevitable so they look at what they stand to gain. They do a calculated risk-benefit analysis and if the analysis comes out right, and the project is worth taking on, they still keep looking at the possibility of failure to motivate them. These people know the difference between wanting to fail and getting ready for setbacks. Their mindset shifts to failing quickly. They want to know if this will not pan out. I want this to flame out quickly so I can pick myself up, dust myself off, and go on to the next opportunity. Quick failure means quick lessons. Don’t look at it as a judgment on your character as a human being. It is not some summation of your value as a person, nor does it define you. Instead, you learn what you need to learn like Thomas Edison who once used a hair from a man’s beard in his efforts to invent the light bulb. Obviously, that did not pan out, but that didn’t stop Edison from trying many times. You need to fail quickly so you can quickly determine that the road you’re on is not the right road. You can then shift to another road and then try the next one. Quick lessons mean a faster track to eventual success. That’s how successful people think. On the contrary, people who struggle for the rest of their lives experience failure and look at failure as something that defines them. What did they do wrong? They dwelled on it. Instead of a quick failure that yields important quick lessons, they dwell on the failure and the lessons they get are worse lessons because it’s all about them. They create stories in their head about things like: They’re not thinking intelligently They don’t have enough money People don’t like them. They can’t get ahead. They don’t have enough time to get things done. They’re trapped in their life with all these ‘toxic’ lessons Fail quickly and get the lesson quickly. Learn from it and apply this knowledge moving forward. This enables you to minimize the cost and the pain. Suffering will always be a part of the equation but it doesn’t mean that you have to maximize it. It doesn’t mean that you have to let it burn you and define you as a person. When you do that, you are only making success more elusive. In today’s business environment, where things are changing constantly, speed of execution is a lot more important than perfect execution. While you’re trying to perfect a certain solution or product, the situation might change, rendering your product or solution irrelevant. Make it “good enough,” publish it, improve it based on market feedback, rinse and repeat. This approach creates success much faster. By failing, we are learning. By learning, I mean we see how best to adapt to the environment and respond by adjusting our behavior incrementally but continually. This helps build momentum internally and externally. This also creates better quality solutions over time. If you’re holding on to an idea, product, service, in fear of rejection or failure – what are you waiting for? ~Wishing you success!

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How A Fear Of Failure Manifests More Failure

Did you know failure is your friend? Depending on where you’re at in your life, you may either be laughing out loud or cringing. You may even have this almost irresistible urge to close this article and move on to more interesting things. Well, hear me out. Most people are afraid of failure. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that out. This is part of the human condition. We are drawn to pleasure and we recoil from pain and discomfort. We would love the big mansions, the swimming pools, the global vacations every two months, and the tons of money in the bank, but we hate or we try to avoid putting in day-after-day of seemingly meaningless work. Try to avoid meeting the very difficult people that can lead to great deals because it’s painful to deal with them. We would like to get the reward without going through the painful process. I understand that since that’s part of human nature. This is why we’re afraid of failure because we know it guarantees nothing. We can put in the work, the time, the effort and make all the sacrifices and at the end of that process, there’s nothing there. You’re left holding an empty bag. The truth is you’re already failing right now if you’re not shooting for your goals and dreams. You really are failing because every day you spend being paralyzed by fear of failure is a day not spent working towards success. Fear of failure can paralyze you or make you do things the wrong way. The worst thing you can do is to put things off and wait for the ‘right time’ to happen because that perfect time never comes, right? Stop waiting for tomorrow because tomorrow will never come. There will be many duties, responsibilities, and obligations that will pop up all over the place that will distract you. They will throw you off track. You can bet on that. Fear of failure can also make you hesitate and doubt yourself. Doubt is an emotional cancer in certain contexts. It can burn away at you. The worst part is it builds slowly until it explodes, usually at the moment you least expect it, and you end up crashing and burning. Don’t doubt your capabilities. Challenge yourself but don’t doubt. The ultimate truth about you is that you can do it if you put in the time, effort, and sacrifice and choose the right goals. Unfortunately, if you’re so deathly afraid of failure, you won’t go through the learning process. It’s painful to constantly think about failure, or failing, or not being good enough, or not having enough time, or whatever other excuse or limiting belief you can come up with. That’s why you’re not trying anything new – you think you’re avoiding failure. You don’t even give yourself the chance to succeed or fail. Successful People Think Differently We all want to be successful, but sometimes the fear of failure prevents us from trying new things. Failure is a necessary component on the way to success. If you’re not failing, then chances are you’re just sitting around doing nothing. Successful people don’t fear failure. Believe it or not, successful people know failure is always a possibility. But they make it work for them. They view failure as the price they pay to learn and grow. If you want a good example of this, pay attention to that quote from Thomas Edison. He said, “I didn’t fail to invent the light bulb. I discovered 101 ways of not inventing light bulbs.” Do you see the logic in that? Failure is the price you pay as you learn. You can use it as a steppingstone to the ultimate success or you can use it as a gravestone to all your hopes, wishes, dreams, and ambitions. The truth is successful people view failure as a necessity. Failure is not the opposite of success – instead, it’s part of the process.

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