How To Overcome Failure

In the midst of failure when you’re feeling so awful, how do you actually gain positivity and move forward?

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I personally separate failure into two categories: micro or macro.

A macro failure is dying. A macro failure is filing for bankruptcy and going directly out of business. A macro failure is somebody you care about punching you in the face and saying, “You are a piece of s*&t; I will never talk to you again.”

I deem almost everything else a micro failure. I believe that most people look at micro failures and make them bigger than they are. It’s a mindset. There’s always a way to come back if it didn’t kill you.

It’s definitely the cliche “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” So for me, I’ve got a lot of things not going well. I’ve got way more things not going well than I have things going well in volume, but my overall strategy and vision is working. My day to day is not.

And I think most people have it reversed. Most people don’t take chances and are doing things on a day to day basis to protect themselves from the micro failures. But what’s happening is they don’t realise at a macro, they’re not moving forward, and so they’re losing.

For me, I literally fight fires for a living. Problem after problem after problem. Every morning when I wake up, I have 27 emails and 19 texts, and 4 missed phone calls and 3 voice-mails telling me something just went horribly wrong.