Blueprint to Business

CHAPTER 8Failure

I have never failed at anything.

Failure to me is fatal. When I think of failure, I think of something that truly has come to an end. That's all. It ended.

I tell people that I suffer temporary defeats every single day. As I said earlier I learned that from Zig Ziglar. If you don't know who Zig Ziglar is, I suggest you go online and buy all his books and audios. He changed my life.

When you look at some of the things that I have gone through, a lot of people would look at them as failures. The first time that I took the bar exam I missed it by one question. One question was the difference between passing and not passing. Not failing, but not passing. A lot of people say it's a pass/fail test and academia will tell you that you failed. If I truly had failed I would have given up and not gone back to take the bar exam and pass. Failure, again, is fatal. It's something that you've ultimately just given up on. When you start to change how you think about failure, to consider things not going as planned to be a temporary defeat, your mindset starts to change.

When I didn't pass the bar exam, friends expressed their concerns for me, saying, “Mike, I'm sorry that you didn't pass and it's really too bad. A lot of people don't pass the first time. It took JFK Jr. five times to pass the bar exam.” None of that made me feel any better. I didn't look at it as a failure. The biggest thing I learned from that experience is that I wasn't prepared.

In my book, Ask More, Get ...