In business and in life, no one – and I mean NO ONE (no matter how much you seem to think they have it all together) has everything perfect. Looks can be (and ARE) deceiving.  The only constant in life is that we WILL fall down.  We WILL fail.  A lot.  So … do you learn from those failures?  Do you STAY down?  How quickly do you get back up again?

Who Do You Spend Your Time With?

There’s a lot more to that equation than fail = try again.  Who you spend your time with will likely determine a lot about how you try again – whether you even DO try again, and how fast you do it.   So here’s a question.  Who do you spend your time with?  And do they encourage you to try again or do they keep you from trying? What lessons do you learn when you fail and how do you apply them to your next attempt?

Movie Inspiration

I’m a big (geeky) fan of two particular movies.  The first is Rocky.  The original one.  They’re all good – but that one was ground breaking. I loved how pig-headed Rocky was.  How very imperfect he was (right down to his speech patterns). How he kept on trying even in the face of incredible adversity.  He was the best because he had heart.  He stuck with it.  He took the hits and was knocked down.  He got back up again, against all odds. He was the best because he stuck around.

The second (and far newer) movie is Captain Marvel. And surprisingly, this movie and Rocky have a lot of things in common.  Carol Danvers was a fighter.  She demonstrated that she was a hero – not because she had incredible powers (that happened after she’d already demonstrated heroic qualities) – but because she got beaten down – just like Rocky – and got back up again.  Constantly.

How Does This Relate To Us?

You don’t have to be the hardest hitter.  You just need to be able to take a hard hit and get back up again.  You don’t have to always be right.  You just have to believe in yourself.  Know you’re going to fail.  Learn lessons from the failure – and try again.  Because it’s not about being perfect.  It’s about learning from the failures – until something works.

Success isn’t perfection.  Success is being beaten down until you thought you weren’t going to be able to get up again – and doing it anyway. It’s about persistence.  Perseverance.  Consistency.

You’re not perfect – no one is!  But you’ve got this.