I just finished reading “failing forward” by: John C. Maxwell and I want to share with you my thoughts on it and what I got out of it so that hopefully you can benefit from this blog post and get a lot of value from the book without reading it. Although I highly recommend reading it i’m going to try to share with you the biggest golden nuggets that I got out of the book so that they can benefit your life whether you read the book or not.
The book’s title made me curious when i first saw it. “Failing forward” it just makes sense! Failing backward is the thing that happens more often for most people though unfortunately.
Learning to understand failure and use it as a learning lesson to propel you in business and in life is a HUGE lesson! in fact it may just be one of life’s biggest lesson that only a small percentage learn.
Failure is inevitable, you are going to fail. You will fall and scrape your knee the first time you try to ride without training wheels. Failure is like skin, it will cover you every single day of your life and you have to find a way to deal with it. You can get used to it and change you and overcome it or you can be shy and never go out in public because failure (skin) is emberassing.
Here are the 15 steps to fail forward from the book:
1. Realize there is one major difference between average people and achieving people. – Average people sit while achievers overcome while overachievers overcome then make sure it NEVER happens again because they already learned that lesson once!
2. Learn a new definition of failure. – Failure is like a bad economy for an entrepreneur, we only see the good stuff! Failure is growth in progress.
3. Remove the “You” from failure. – “You” are not your license, bank account or any other document anyone tries to attach to you! Forget all that and focus on learning and evolving into a better person.
4. Take action and reduce your fear. – Action diminishes fear, when’s the last time you were afraid of something and did it anyway and afterwards thought: “That was easy” you’d be surprised how often your fear is false evidence appearing real! <
5. Change your response to failure by accepting responsibility. – Responsibility is a tough one for a lot of people, we are raised and programmed to blame the government, our parents and everything else in the external environment. When you look inside instead of outside to solve a problem your world has a huge shift.
6. Don’t let the failure from outside get inside you. – Failure is an external event, you are an internal person! 2 different places! Failure is not you… it’s a undesired outcome so try again!
7. Say Good-bye to yesterday. – It’s dead and gone, don’t let it drain you emotionally and physically. Emotions are powerful and if you are holding things from the past they are taking a toll on your health, energy and ability to move forward and grow!
8. Change yourself, and your world changes. – In Life 99 times out of 100 if you change your world changes, maybe even 100 out of 100 times!
9. Get over yourself and start giving yourself. – Seriously, no one cares about you or your business until you care about them and theirs. Don’t forget yourself, just get OVER yourself. < BIG difference!
10. Find the benefit in every bad experience. – There is always one, sometimes you just have to see it through optimistic eyes.
11. If at first you do succeed, try something harder. – Is it easy? Give yourself challenge! stretch yourself! how do you grow if you aren’t stretched?
12. Learn from a bad experience and make it a good experience. – There’s always a lesson to be learned in those crappy circumstances. The funny thing is that in your life those events will keep showing up over and over and over until you learn that lesson! so just learn it and it won’t show up as often!
13. Work on the weakness that weakens you. – If you really have a weakness that is hindering your personal or professional growth then work on it otherwise as a business owner I recommend that you outsource because they will do a much better job than you faster and cheaper than you doing it all Mr. macho man (or woman)!
14. Understand there’s not much failure between failure and success. – How did the tortoise and the hair story go again?
15. Get up, get over it, get going! – I would say one of my strongest qualities is persistence and work ethic. I never give up (thanks winston) and I am always working hard and smart! (both are important) When something negative happens look at an are of your life where you are confident and an overcomer and feel the feeling of loving yourself regardless of what happend and feel like a champion and winner regardless. Life is 100% your attitude and 0% what happens to you, sorry I just had to take it to the next level because attitude is so important.
Throughout the book he shares insight and stories of how each one of these lessons apply.
The main thing I got from the book was that failure is not you, it’s an event that didn’t go as planned so learn from it, pick yourself up and persist until you get your desired result. Failing is not emberassing, making the same mistake twice is! so learn from your “failures” aka: shortcomings.
Fear of failure is one of the biggest reasons people don’t take any risks in life in my opinion. That’s why learning to fail and learn and grow from it will be one of your biggest assets and self growth characteristics as an entrepreneur and CANI (constant and never-ending improvement) person.
Remember Fear is just false evidence appearing real, there is someone in the world who has done what you are afraid to do and is not afraid of it. Keep that in mind 
As for the value I got from this book I would give it a 9 out of 10. It was good and definitely worth the read. Pick it up and make sure to take notes while reading!
Take care! Thanks so much for all the comments and retweets!
David King,
@Davidbeking
P.S. Remember!!! The more you fail the more you succeed! So get out there and start making failure fun and laugh it off… success is just around the corner!
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