The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

September 30Failure's Message

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

Henry David Thoreau—Walden (1854)

Let's face it: at some point everybody gets knocked down. Things don't always go as planned, but it's how you handle adversity that will become the ultimate expression of your success.

There are only so many things you have control over, and number one on that list is how you think and feel about daily events.

We can't control the weather, what others say about us, or when someone decides to rip our ideas off as their own. We can't control failure or paradise; we can only decide what we want to learn from it—and the lessons are countless.

In some cases, what we see as a failure is a mistake or error in judgment on our part coming home to roost. Or it could just be something we weren't quite ready to pull off in precisely the manner we chose. But either way, there's a lesson if we wish to accept it.

The fantastic thing about growing ...