Failure Leaves Clues, Too!

Recently, I invited David Leedom to review and address one of my Sales Academy graduating classes. David has been coming to my seminars since 2002 and has taken every single one of them at least once. I thought he would be an ideal choice to speak to the graduates about success. But he surprised me with his opening statement.

David began by saying, “Dave always reminds us of that Tony Robbins quote, ‘Success leaves clues.’” But it’s also important to remember that failure leaves clues, too.” Although I’d never verbalized that thought before, I realized that David was absolutely right; failure does indeed leave clues — and often, they can be quite valuable to us.

As I reflect back on some of the failures I’ve made in life and in business (and that’s a mighty long list), I realize that many of the failures we face are responsible for our eventual successes. If you’ve ever been late to an important meeting, or worse, forgotten it altogether (I’m speaking from experience in both instances), you will probably never forget the embarrassment and cost of making such a mistake. That’s good! You don’t want to forget; you want to learn from it.

Mel Gibson once said, “Pain is the precursor to change.” What that means is, until we experience enough pain, we often don’t change something that we should in order to avoid similar failures in the future. We know that we are imperfect and that we are all going to repeatedly fail. The important lesson is to take the clues from our failures and transform them into the means for improving ourselves. In business, this could be improving our communication with our clients, creating a reliable scheduling system, or clarifying the words in our contracts and policies.

But let’s not forget that we fail our loved ones too. Those are often much more painful lessons to admit. Still, recognizing that we do not want to let down the people around us who matter most, we have to take it to heart and resolve to do better in the future. Remember, as the saying goes, “Every stumble keeps you humble.”

“Learning from success is important but learning from failure is vital to succeeding” – Anonymous

Let me hear from you.

This excerpt is taken from my Sales Academy program. I encourage you to click here to register for the Spring 2023 Sales Academy beginning on Friday, April 21, 2023 and running for five consecutive Fridays from 9 AM to 12 noon Eastern Standard Time at the Comfort Suites in Manheim, PA. This event will also be available through live streaming.