In this episode, we discuss how failures in life can lead you to great things.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
At the end of today’s podcast episode, I’m going to give you a prompt question to reflect on in your journal. The idea is to take one to five minutes to reflect on today’s lesson and write a minimum of one paragraph on how you can apply the lesson in your life life. You can use an actual journal, a word document like on Google Drive, or your note-taking app like Evernote. The idea is that you’re actually thinking about how to process the information to help you improve your life.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about how failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities. I’m a big believer that failure has the opportunity to teach you a lot more in life than success. Success causes you to think you’re good and doesn’t really challenge you for the future. Failure causes us to reflect on what happened and pushes us out of our comfort zone. This the difference between success and failure. When you always go for success, then you’re not doing everything you can. This doesn’t mean that you go out and fail in front of a lot of people.
You can fail in private first, and then once you mastered the subject, then you can go in front of a crowd. If you were told to give a speech at the end of the month, the idea is not that you give the speech on one shot, then you’re just going to be really bad at your speech. You want to start with the outline, then write the speech out, and then you practice that speech until you’re ready to give it in front of a crowd. How much you practice will depend on the stakes. If it’s in an informal meeting setting, then you don’t have to practice that much. If the speech in front of a huge crowd at a conference, then you want to practice more and more.
Even if do you do have to do a speech in front of a huge crowd, you can still mess up and recover from it. There is one public speaking coach that told me they fell off the stage but then had a witty oneliner once they got back on stage and he still gets invited to do speeches.
I remember falling so many times in the Marines. I remember going in front of boards and messing up so badly by stuttering that I didn’t want to go on any board for the rest of my time in the Marines. I’m really not the best at doing things on the fly and I need a lot of practice. I hardly ever can do something on the first or second try and perfect something, but I noticed with rehearsal, that I can be pretty good. Once I got into college and had to start doing presentations in front of a bunch of other students, I realized that this was so much easier than those board meetings in the Marine Corps. Plus I had time to practice because the syllabus told us when we were going to do presentations. Now I can give a presentation with ease if given enough practice.
In business, I’ve had so many failures as well. I failed in front of clients and missed out on bringing them on, I failed in how I ran my business the first couple of years in making no money, and I fail so many different marketing events where no one showed up. There were stressful times when I was losing a lot of business and not generating any income. Just thinking about the summer of 2016 just brings back so many chills but I’m so much better as a person for growing through that. Now I feel like more problems that come my way are small and can be easily handled. And is probably the reason why I ended up started my own financial planning firm.
When I was going through a tough moment in life, I started searching for more material on how to become a better financial planner. And I just started consuming more and more material and tried to implement it in my financial planning career. Then eventually two years later, I came across a Podcast that showed me how easy it was to start my own financial planning firm. So if I never went through all that failure in my first two years, then I probably wouldn’t have come across how to start my financial planning firm. Plus by sticking it out at my last firm, I went to this very valuable class about taxes that gave me so much confidence in how to run my practice.
I’m glad that I went through that failure because it really did set me up for greater responsibilities in the future. From all the books that I read, this is a common thing that successful people go through. They have some type of setback that causes them to be even stronger in the future. I just read the Genghis Khan book and he some initial setbacks with losing his wife and family issues, but overcame those and become Emperor of his people. So when you’re going through something difficult or if you’re failing at something, instead of treating it as a negative, try spinning it around and just call it another fucking growth opportunity. If you treat them as growth opportunities, you will learn from them and learn to take advantage of the opportunity. Then once you get the opportunity, then you’ll just become a better person.
That’s it for today’s episode, and to summarize it, failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities. You have two choices, you can do nothing and let those failures define who you are going to be for the rest of your life or you can take some type of action to learn from them and do better the next time around. So embrace your failures and use them as fuel to help you better a person in the world. You don’t have that much time to waste, so I would get on them as fast as possible and see what you can accomplish in this world.
So in your journal, ask yourself, what was the last failure you had and what did you learn from it and how can you do better the next time around. Is it more practice? Do you have to use a different tactic? Do you need to have a better attitude? Do you need to quit this thing and try something else? Will getting past this obstacle help you become the person you want to become in life? Take some time, reflect, and write one to two paragraph. Then once you’re done writing, start taking some action.
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and just pay for shipping and handling.
I have a quiz on my website that grades your inner circle, so if you want to find out if your inner circle is an A, B, C, D, or F, you can take that quiz at growwithjoe.me/quiz
I’m also trying to do a feedback Friday episode, so if you have a question that you would like to have me answer on the air, just e-mail me at [email protected]
I’m also on Instagram at Grow With Joe and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
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