Are you failing forward or failing backward?

Last Saturday I attended a John Hull Leadership seminar, the topic is on Failing Forward. I was very interested in this topic because I consider myself as somewhat a failure at this point of my life - without career and family.

But God is great. Through this seminar, I started to understand why I'm in the situation I'm in right now and what I can do about it. I will share with you some of the important quotes I have learned and hope you can benefit from it as well. (If you want the notes, feel free to let me know)



· In fact, it seems that all great achievers have made major mistakes on their journey to
success.
· Many people are eager to study lessons on how to succeed. Very few people want to train for failure.
· We all live under the same sky, but we don’t see all the same horizon.
· The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
· An individual can consistently succeed in life only when he or she learns how to confidently look failure and adversity in the eye and keep moving forward anyway.
· In the midst of negative experiences, average people tend to fail backward.
· Adopt a new definition for failure. Regard the experience of failure as the price you pay for progress.
· Mistakes are not failures. Adversity and hardships do not mean defeat. They are merely the price of achievement on the success journey.
· People are not failures until they believe they are.
· Mistakes become failures only when we consistently respond to them incorrectly.
· Make sure you know that your failure does not make you a failure.
· “A life spend in making mistakes is not only more honourable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
· Many people make mistakes but refuse to admit them. To fail forward, a person must first utter three of the most difficult words to say: “I was wrong.”
· Leadership expert Peter Drucker, wrote: “The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes...otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.”
· A man is not defeated by his opponents, but by himself.
· Do not let the failure on the outside penetrate to the inside of you.
· A key quality in the life of an achiever is the ability to put past events behind him and move on. That quality positions a person to tackle current challenges with enthusiasm and a minimum of burdensome personal baggage.
· The problem of people’s pasts impact them in one of two ways: they experience either a breakdown or a breakthrough.
· You will not be able to be your best today until you say good-bye to yesterday.
· People who desire to fail forward must turn their attention away from themselves and toward helping others.
· Be more concerned with what you can give rather than what you can get.
· Giving truly is the highest level of living!
· The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the progress of getting to the top.
· It is in the difficult times that we can experience the greatest growth. We will not grow when there are no problems and challenges.
· Risk must be evaluated not by the fear it generates in you or even by the probability of success or failure, but by the value of the goal. Every noble goal was reached because someone dared to take a risk. The less you risk, the greater you risk of failure. Ironically, the more you risk failure – and actually fail from time to time – the greater your chances of success.
· It is better to try something great and fail than to try nothing great and succeed.
· If you are succeeding at everything you do, then you are probably not pushing yourself hard enough. In other words, you are not taking enough risks.
· If at first you do succeed, try something harder.
· Faith is taking a risk in giving glory of God.
· Change yourself, and your world changes.
· If you whine and complain every time you fail, then failure will remain your enemy. But if you learn from your failures, then you actually benefit from them and that makes failure your friend.
· There is not much difference between success and failure, but that little difference makes a big difference! Persistence is the little difference that makes the big difference when it comes to failing forward.
· Thomas Edison once said: ``I have not failed. I just have found 10,000 ways that don`t work. ``
· Purpose is the fuel that powers persistence.
· Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races, one after another. (Walter Elliot)
· The key to persistence is passion, then the key to passion is purpose. We must run with purpose, not aimlessly.
· Highly successful people have made more mistakes, suffered more adversities, overcame more problems, and experienced more failures than most all the other people you will ever meet.