Business
What's going on everybody, hey this is Colton woods and I want to welcome you to another episode of Learning From The Experts. And today I want to talk to you about a couple of the secrets of success. So here's the deal, I know how frustrating it is as an entrepreneur to waste countless hours sifting through wannabe experts who never actually help me in the end, then to learn years later that there was an expert who really could help me 100 times faster than learning it on my own. I have created this podcast to save you time and money while taking you on a journey with me as I learn from and interview real experts who can actually help you grow your business. My name is Colton woods and you're listening to Learning From The Experts. Awesome! So, I’ve been reading a lot of books recently and I’ve been going through a lot of different materials and I'm starting to see a few different things that are the same in multiple different books about secrets to success. Obviously there's a lot of different parts to success, there's a lot of different secrets there but a couple that I’ve been seen recently, I'd love to share those with you. And one of those is actually - and you're gonna be like "this is really simple, like why is this a secret to success" but think about it. One of them is literally to learn from your mistakes. How many of us learn from our mistakes nowadays? I feel like we're in such a very like failure driven - not failure but like, in our world today, failure is looked so down upon. Failure is like the end of everything. Failure is - if you fail, you should be embarrassed, don't ever do that again, that obviously didn't work for you so why would you ever want to try it? Just like I’ve said so many times to so many different people, just a story of when I was in college and I would tell other students that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I would tell them that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and they would just kind of look at me like I was stupid or like I was crazy for even wanting to be an entrepreneur in the first place. And then the thing that they would say was "oh, well don't you know that 90% of businesses fail?" and I'm like "yeah, I get it, 90% of businesses fail, okay, like small businesses fail". And at first, it used to really affect me but as I thought about it and kind of pondered on it, I'm like "you know what, that's stupid, that's hogwash". I mean, 90% of businesses fail yeah, the majority of those are literally just people starting something where they never do anything with it and then obviously it fails because they didn't do anything with it, you know. They just had an idea, they started a business and never actually took any action and so that's part of the number, you know, the 90%. But as I started thinking about it, my response to those people became - whenever they would say "yeah, don't you know 90% of the businesses fail?", I would just respond and say "yeah, don't you know you'll be working for one of those?". Like think about it guys, whatever you do, any profession you go into, you either own the business or you work for the business, that's it. I mean, those are the two different ways you can go. It doesn't matter what you're going to be doing in life, you will either work for a business or you will own a business or you'll be running the business. Obviously there's a lot more risk involved in running the business but there's also a lot more reward. Elon Musk said something about... "you get paid in comparison to the amount of problems or to the size of problems that you solve". Obviously if you're running a business, you're going to be solving a lot more problems and bigger problems than if you're kind of just an employee doing mundane, everyday work stuff, you're not going to be solving very big problems, not getting paid as much because you're not solving those kind of problems that equal the pay that you're getting, that you're solving. So, learn from your mistakes. Like there's so many people that just are so driven now by failures. As soon as they fail, they think that that's it, like I can't do that again. Instead of thinking, okay what can I learn from that failure? What can I take from it? I see it so much in the world today and it drives me nuts, like people, if you fail, that's awesome, now you know one way not to do it, now you know something that didn't work, why did it not work? Think about it, look through it, figure out why it didn't work. Thomas Edison gets quoted so many times on this and I’ve actually seen him in multiple books just even recently where people are talking about him and how he failed a thousand times and one of his associates, you know, after failing a thousand times trying to come up with the light bulb, the incandescent light bulb, after failing a thousand times, his associate asked him like "do you feel kind of like defeated, you know, do you feel sad that you've failed so many times or even disappointed that you failed so many times?". His response, Thomas Edison's response was like "Are you kidding me, I haven't failed a thousand times, I've just learned how to not create a light bulb a thousand different times. It's not about the failure; it's about what I learned from those failures. And because now I know a thousand ways not to do it, I'm not going to redo those same things and try to make them work". That is the definition of insanity. I mean, the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Obviously Thomas Edison understood that part. But as I was reading, I thought this was really cool actually and I want to kind of make sure I get this right. As I was reading a part in the book called The Obstacle Is the Wayby Ryan Holiday, he was talking about Thomas Edison and he said... Let's see here. "Including closer each time to the one that would finally work" - okay, so that probably doesn't make - there's like no context in there, my bad. But he essentially said like, "eventually, he found a light bulb that worked" and then he said this afterwards, he said "proving that genius often really is just persistence in disguise", that kind of struck me, I was like "oh man, that's so - that is so gold, that's so key". A lot of us think, "oh that person is a genius, they know so much. I could never be them because of how genius they are or how good they are at what they do", but in reality, genius is often just persistence in disguise. Meaning, that person is at that genius level to you because they pursued through the path. They continued taking steps that got them to where they are now and they learned from their failures as they went along the way. It is not bad to fail, in fact I say, fail often fail fast. I mean, that's - you'll read that in so many different books and so many different experts will tell you the same thing; fail often fail fast and learn from it. A lot of people forget the part to learn from it. Seriously, like think about the things that you failed in your life and what you can learn from those instead of just like dwelling on the fact that you failed or feeling like the depressed part of it because you failed at that. A lot of people when they fail in certain things or even in school growing up, like "oh, I failed in football, you know, throwing that pass" whatever it may be. I was never a quarterbacker so I don't know. But I failed to like throw that pass correctly, I suck at this, I'm gonna beat myself up like I just need to give up, why try anymore? When in reality, the best quarterbackers have failed way more times than that and it's because of those failures and learning from them that they are the best now, because they have learned from those failures. So, I didn't want this one to be like too long of a podcast but I just wanted to get the point across as much they could. Don't feel bad about failing, it's going to happen, it's inevitable. There's also another quote that I say all the time, "pain is inevitable, misery is optional". Like, here you may feel some pain and there have been plenty of people who have gone through some crazy pain in their lives because of something that they failed at or because of a business - a big business that they had that they fail at, that's super painful. But are they going to let it be miserable, like let it dictate their life so they're miserable or are they going to learn from it, adjust in the future, and create something even better. So yeah, that's kind of like my two cents for today and what I'm reading from a couple different books actually, so one of them that have been reading a lot lately and I just had to do a podcast on it was The Obstacle Is the Way. Honestly there's so many golden one-liners in that book. And then another one that I was actually referred to by a friend of mine, John Ferguson, called The Advertising Solutionand it's just got a bunch of just golden nuggets in there laced throughout. I'm not - I’ve only just started in that one but it's got some great stuff in there. So, one of the secrets to success is to learn from your mistakes. So, fail, fail often but learn from them and adjust accordingly and move on, so yeah. Thanks guys, that's what I got for you today. Are you looking to jumpstart your business by learning or getting help from the real experts? Go to learningfromtheexperts.com to find pre-approved experts that I’ve hand-picked for you. Please don't forget to let me know how I'm doing by subscribing and rating and leaving feedback.