“Lottery Mindset”: only 1 way to fail, but millions of ways to succeed!

Life’s little known secret; it serves us well to remember that there is only one way to truly “fail”.
The only way to fail is to give up and not learn from “failure”. And to top this exciting news off, there are millions of ways to succeed!
I find it so fascinating that most of the people on this plant think the opposite. People think that there are millions of ways to fail and only a few ways to win. In my audio program, I call this the “lottery mindset”.

Most people fail from giving up. How quick and easy do we all say “I quit”, “never mind”, or “whatever”? And how rare and difficult do we say or hear “I’m going to make this work”, “what will it take to succeed?”, and “I will win”?
Sad truths. It’s too easy to throw in the towel and back away from a challenge. Trying and then giving up is the only real way to “fail”.

Looking deeper into the only way to fail is to think of the word “failure” in a negative way and not to see how much opportunity and educational value is in the action of failing. When learning from failure we must be prepared to potentially fail multiple times before a lesson is learned. Indeed, we may even fail the same way several times. I disagree with the second part of this phrase: “learn from your failure and don’t repeat the same mistake twice”. It’s far more valuable to understand the “mistake” than to overly focus on not repeating it. Repetition, if approached from a scholastic level, also leads to learning. Repetition is bad, if it leads to negative conditioning (repeating a mistake or harmful choice without learning and acting in a positive direction). But pushing hard for a goal or result only to fail several times in the same general way - gives us a study and examples to figure out what’s going on. Pushing several more times may lead to new ways of failure and greater learning potential. If you’re taking the time to study the “failure” and strategizing new efforts to solve the problem, you will eventually break through and succeed.

Then, when we succeed, it helps to remember this is only 1 method of success. Later when we have time, studying our other failures may lead to different methods of success granting us more profound results. These additional results may apply to the same challenge or even new and more complicated challenges. When we examine challenges and failures deeper we realize that there are infinite methods of succeeding. So many different ways to succeed, we as human beings will never be able to explore each and every one.

Next time you’re “failing”, learn from it. Explore it. Flip the equation around. Instead of just buying another “losing” lottery ticket, look deeper into the game. Find a better way to invest your resources, learn from the game, apply your findings to other challenges, and ask yourself why you’re playing the game in the first place. You may realize you could get the same desired result from a different course of action.

Open your mind. Most of the people around you are in the “lottery mindset”. They have odds stacked against them due to their own choices and yet still throw a dollar a day away. Today is your day to play a different game using the same game board. A game board where there is only one way to fail and millions of ways to win. How do you want to win?