When I started Plain Ordinary Dragon one of my goals was to post an article every day for the first month. Not a week into the process, and I have missed that goal. It makes me sad. I’m sure at least some of you dragons have felt a bit disappointed in the past when you miss a goal you have set for yourself, your team, or company. It’s natural to have an emotional reaction to a failure. It’s natural to be hard on yourself. I know I’m my harshest critic (of course, that may all change when the Interweb trolls find me, but until then…). Even when I’m smiling to the world, my internal conversation is rarely positive. I mean, how can missing a goal I know I could have & should have met, be anything other than disappointing?
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
****************— Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis**********************
Yep, we are asking the wrong questions with this way of thinking. We should be asking different questions. Better questions. Dragon questions. Like, What is the one thing I can learn from this failure which can help me be better at what I do? How to I keep from repeating the failure again in the future? Better questions. Of course missing a goal is disappointing. Failure always is a disappointment, but what defines greatness or mediocrity is how we react to our failure. We should really be looking at our failures more as perceived failures than actual failures because each failure we endure in life is a stepping stone to success – especially if we take the time & effort to analyze the issue & learn from it. That’s a post for another day, however. If we take our failure, missed goal, or bypassed opportunity & embrace it instead of wasting the most precious resource we have – time – on the missed goal in form of sadness then we start to reform our thoughts to see new opportunity. We will become more empowered to fail without remorse because we will begin to treasure it as, not only part of our success, but as a vital piece of the success puzzle. When we ask better questions we frame our thought processes in a way to see the big picture in a positive light. To learn. To see future opportunities.
Dragons, the sooner you fail, the sooner you you can adjust, and the sooner you get to the next step (which is probably another failure – if you are doing it right – another chance to be better than you were before – always moving forward). If you take action and fail quickly – you are on the road to success. Learn to fail quickly & adjust with style.