Items Tagged With success

I've been meaning to write a post reviewing one of the articles Pete Williams has had publishing to his blog while he's been overseas. My main reason was purely selfish, Pete was running a competition for people who reviewed his articles, and winners would receive a swag of goodies. I really dig Pete's stuff, so I wanted to win.

But I've been pretty busy the last few weeks and time looked like beating me to the punch. But then Pete wrote an article about failure, and there being no such thing, and that struck a cord with me so much that I knew I needed to set a time and write something. So, it's Sunday morning, I have a brilliant coffee in front of me, I have no pressing work to do, and it's time to write a review.

What I love about Pete's article is the simplicity of it. People need to realise some basic truths in order to overcome them. What Pete suggests, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is that failure is just a perception. There is no such thing, it doesn't exist. Same for success. It's just a perception as well.

Our culture tells us what success and failure is, and we hear it so much and so often that we just accept it as a reality. It becomes a Pavlov's dog scenario, and people judge themselves and others based on what they have been conditioned to believe is so. People go though their entire lives living in this lie. I know this because I see it all around me every day. When I made the decision to leave the teaching profession and make my living full time from the internet, I had many, many naysayers. All of the negativity came from one source, fear.

I believe that fear is the one major controlling factor in all of our lives. In my situation, the motivating fear was to have lived a life where I didn't take chances just in in case, and ended up an old man full of regret. For the people critical of my decision, the fear was grounded in one of three ways. Fear that I would fail, a projection of their own insecurities; Fear that I would succeed, a projection of jealousy or resentment; or fear of the unknown, not understanding this business and therefore being afraid of it. The only people in my life that were happy for me, were those who had no fear associated with the path I chose.

Pete goes on to give a history lesson in the development and acceptance of PostIt Notes. It works on two levels. On the first level we have the classic example of something perceived as a failure. Spencer Silver created an adhesive classified as a failure, spent five long years trying to make it better, until a use was found for the original adhesive. The only reason this first adhesive was classified as a failure was because it was perceived that way. Nobody had found a use for it, so it was seen as a failure until that changed. A shift in thinking is often all that's needed for something to be viewed in a completely different way

On the second level, this is a great example of the concept of fear in action. One group of people (the 3M marketing department), rejected the PostIt notes as a failure. I believe fear plays a part here in terms of fear of the unknown and fear of an product that doesn't sell. If the product didn't sell, the marketing department would've had to wear the blame as the people who brought the product to market.

On the flipside, the secretaries began using the PostIt notes with a complete lack of fear. They had them at hand and found a use for them, there were no perceived or real pressures creating fear to contend with. There was no perception of failure or success, just the reality.

Look at the issues in your life, both personal and professional. Everything you see as a failure or a success, what are they really? Try to remove fear from the equation and just look at things from a fact based perspective. Do things look different? They should.

Pete's Article