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How to go from failure to failure and win

Good morning. It is Monday, and it is time for us to talk about our success habit for the month and what we’re going to talk about this month. We are actually in October of this year, which I find just mind-blowing. I can’t believe it’s here, but what I wanted to talk about this month and what we’re going to be talking about is how to keep moving forward. Right? And that’s with anything that is developing your persistence muscle, staying persistent, persevering. So I want to start off with my favorite quote. One of my favorite quotes from Winston Churchill success is the ability to go from one failure to another, with no loss of enthusiasm. If you’re looking for the secret ingredient for success, then stop looking. The only thing you need is perseverance. Then, I built the ability to keep going no matter what, once in Churchill.

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So that’s what we’re going to talk about. I chose to talk about it this month, because for me as a business owner, I’m heading, we’re heading into our fourth quarter. So this is the quarter where we’ve got the last few months to hit goals. Maybe that we didn’t get the rest of this year, but it’s also the time of year that everyone kind of gives up on the year, right? Because it’s October and then November is holidays and December is the holidays. And so things that we wanted for ourselves personally, or whether it’s a fitness goal, weight loss goal, um, starting new things. We kind of just say, I have the years over, and let’s move into the next year, but it’s not over. You still have three more months of this year to get things done. So that’s why I wanted to do it in October so that we don’t give up on what we wanted and we don’t push it off another day.

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And that we start working on being persistent and persevering and keep getting up failure after failure or setback after setback so that we learn how to build that muscle. Cause it’s just like when you work out, all of the growth is in the 11th rep, not the 10th rep. All of the growth is when you keep going when you keep pushing beyond whatever, what you thought you could do wherever you thought you could go. If you just pushed us a little bit more, just a little bit longer, just a little bit further, and do that every day. You’re going to see the results that you’ve never gotten before. And it’s just staying the course and getting up and then getting knocked down and getting up and getting knocked down and getting up, which is one of the reasons why I think martial arts is one of the best, best tools that you can use to get these, um, visceral lessons because we do it every day.

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You know, we learn something new and we don’t do it so well. I learned something new. I don’t do it so well, anything new reverse for a long time, I didn’t do it so well, but you just keep going and you keep going. And then it was a perfect example. We did promotions on Friday night at our karate school and we promote the kids to the next belt. And I have two students that are going into the belt that is like this far away from becoming a black belt. Like this is the belt right before the next test that they take is going to be for their blackout. And we were talking to them about, we always have our students have thought why they’re proud of themselves. And they were like ma or mean, I don’t know, it was just a test. It was just another test.

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And as we started to get them to talk, what, what we realized, cause the parents are on the sidelines going, what you did this, you, you broke three boards for the first time you were sick. You did a form. You didn’t even know you pushed through this, you know? And they, they have become so accustomed to challenging themselves in succeeding that they didn’t even think it was a thing. Now it’s kind of become who they are. And that, that is the beauty of persistence. That is the beauty of getting up and doing it again and falling down and getting up and doing it again. And, and, and we’re in that because when you do that when you get, get that muscle built, then when it happens, it’s not a thing. It’s just, oh, I got knocked down. Oh, I didn’t do that very well.

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All right. And you build this resilience to challenges and resilience to obstacles that is just so beautiful. And at first it sounded like the students were challenging me. Like your test wasn’t hard enough, or I didn’t really learn anything. But the more we dug into it is that they didn’t view it the same as they did when they were taking the test at a lower go rank, which was just in my mind. Beautiful. And I will make sure that they continue to challenge themselves because we got, we can’t go to the next level, if everything is on this level, if that makes sense. So when we’re talking about going to the next level, when we talk about transforming ourselves into who we’re supposed to become, there has to be some growth in, there has to be some things that stretch us in ways that stretch us.

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And if we’re not stretching ourselves, then we need to be in a community that creates that for us, if that makes sense. So that’s why we’re talking about how to keep moving forward. And I always try and give the human brain. We need a lot of reasons. We give ourselves a lot of reasons not to do things. And so my goal is to give you a lot of reasons to do things, especially with perseverance, because it’s not comfortable and it feels yucky and it feels awkward. And it’s not a feel good feeling until you get to the other side. So I wanted to give you some other benefits that you’re going to get when you commit to just persevere. And when you commit to just keep going to just keep doing the thing, regardless of what people say, regardless of, of what people around you are talking about, regardless, just keep doing the thing.

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So this is what’s going to happen. I’m only going to cover, I think maybe three or four. And the exciting thing is, um, some of, you know, some of you don’t know, so I have written a book on how to punch failure in your face, in the face, not your race, how to punch failure in the base. And it’s a nine-step guide to doing these things. And what we’re talking about this month is actually step nine, keep moving forward is the last thing that we talk about when you’re working on your growth journey. So let’s talk about some of the benefits. Some of the benefits you’re going to get are when you keep going, you are going to become an expert in that thing a long time ago. Um, before I wrote my book, I’ve been wanting to, I’ve been wanting to write a book since 2005.

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I’m not gonna lie. I’m completely confessed to that. I’ve been feeling like I should write a book since 2005. I have not written, I did not write. I wrote a book during the pandemic, but nobody’s seen it yet. You’ll see it before Christmas, but no one has seen it yet. And then I wrote how to punch failure in the face and took action on that one. But when I was researching on writing, I felt like everything had to be perfect. And I was researching like the best copywriters and the best writers and reading a lot of books on writing, Brian, Tracy. And one of the, the things that I read was exactly that, like when you read up on everything on that topic, when you read up, then you do become the expert. The more that I persist and the more that I persevere and push myself as an instructor, as a business owner, and as a writer, teacher, then yeah, I am the expert on that because I’m failing the most and I’m learning the most from my failures and I’m getting up and I’m implementing changes.

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And so I’ll, I see patterns faster. I recognize things more quickly. And so that’s one of the benefits. Now, if you don’t want to be an extrovert, it’s okay, because it’s still gonna motivate you to try harder when you fail, when you persist and go through, who wants to do that again? Not me. I don’t want to fail. I don’t. I want the success part. I wanna, I want to get through the breakthrough part where everything’s working, not stay in this cycle of always having to learn. So when you put yourself in that cycle of learning, failing, learning, failing, you get through it more quickly because no one wants to continue to learn and fail, learn and fail. Everybody wants to taste them success. And so it motivates you to learn faster, to get it faster, to implement faster. So another benefit, it is a sign of success.

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The most successful people have failed the most. And probably some of them have not only feel the most would I feel the biggest, right? So they put themselves out there in a way that when you fail people know, it was interesting. I was speaking with my best friend from high school this weekend. And, uh, I didn’t even know that she had also written a book during the pandemic and we were talking about what she wanted to do with it. And she said she wasn’t sure because she didn’t want to be seen as a failure that she didn’t want other people to view it as a failure. But my, my, my point in sharing that story with her is what I said to her. It’s only a failure based on what you expect from the book, right? So failure is in framed in what you think should happen.

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Sometimes we get so caught up in what other people think about us and our accomplishments that we forget. We decide what success or failure we decide. We choose. We get to choose that. So the most successful people know that and they put themselves out there. So the world may look at it like they epically failed, but maybe they’ve learned the one thing that they needed to learn from it. And so they didn’t see it as a failure, right? So persistence is a sign of success and the most successful people fail the most. Um, I want you to think about who for you that, that that’s true. Like what, who do you know that it’s failed the most, but it was, but it has also been a success. And I mean, I always read up and I think I put in the book, Steve jobs and Abraham Lincoln were the two examples that I use because Steve jobs kicked out of his own company, right.

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He had some obstacles, he had some things and, and, and, but now people look at him and they don’t, they don’t think about those failures. Same thing with Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln. I was okay. I think it was after I watched the movie, Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter. I’m not gonna lie that I looked up Abraham Lincoln. Um, there was something else that made me read up on him. And when I read up on him, the thing says, the press said about him and his day were horrible. And his whole life story was one, like one failure to failure to failure. And, and when you think about Abraham Lincoln, you don’t think about any of those things, right? You think about his wings, you think about his big successes. And so I just challenge you on that level to think about someone that that’s important to you, that you admire, that you would like to be, and look at their journey and see how they exercise their persistent muscle.

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Okay. So that’s the last thing I want to say. The last thing I want to say today is that you will be setting an example. Now that’s important to some, maybe more for parents or teachers or coaches, but we’re all setting an example to someone else. This is one of the biggest lessons that I, that I really worked to teach my students that you’re, by being in a space and doing what you do, someone is watching you. And if they’re either looking at being a good example or a bad one, so by being persistent and not quitting, you’re being a good example from someone who might admire you. You don’t even know who you are inspiring, who might be looking at you wanting to be like you. I know it’s a trippy thing. When I tell this to my students, they don’t believe me, but, we get to demonstrate it very, very easily for them.

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But if you’re out there being in doing something and people and attracting people to you, you’re, you’re being an example. You can be an inspiration to anyone if we choose it. So by choosing, just to persist, to do the things we feel we should do, or the things that we know we should do, we’re setting a good example and we’re possibly inspiring someone else to do the same. How cool is that? All right. So those, that’s what we’re going to talk about this month. And we’re going to give you some practical, practical things to do, because talking about persistence and being persistent are two different things. And if everyone, if it was easy, everyone would do it. Um, but it’s not. It takes some of the other success habits that we’ve talked about. It takes that showing up thing. It takes a hundred percent philosophy.

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It takes going for, it takes some of the other things that we talk about, but you will do it. You’ll get it done. And then you’ll get to reap the rewards of it. So it’s just October, let’s finish this year, being more persistent and going after more than we’ve ever gone after, before, and enjoy the process and having fun, doing it like good schooling with our eyes wide open, knowing what we’ve known, it’s going to be challenging, but can’t wait to see where we come out at the end in December. So w w we can create something even more phenomenal next year. So on that note, that’s what I’m going to leave you to do. Those are the things I want you to think about. Go persist with today, today, whatever you’re doing, if you want to give up, don’t know that you’re on your way to build in that persistent muscle and that you growing to go to the next level. Don’t give up today. All right, I’m going to leave. I’ll talk to you guys on Wednesday to keep you motivated by.