Tag Archives: failure

Don’t Give Up On Your Goals

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Take a moment and look at your life. The year 2020 is 125 days away. Let that sink in. Is this where you thought you would be in 2020?

When you were a little kid, what did 2020 look like in your mind?

 When you were a young adult, what were you going to do with your life by 2020?

What about January 1, 2019? What were you going to accomplish this year?

Many people take a good, hard look at their lives at the end of each year and set their big hairy audacious goals for the coming year, and then they forget about them for eleven and a half months.

Let’s stop right now and take a look at this. If you have been focused and taking massive actions on your 2019 goals, congratulations. Keep it up. I hope you achieve everything you desire. 

For everyone else, I want you to look back on the past eight months. What were those goals and desires? What’s held you back from achieving them? Are you even trying to achieve them still?

Now reset. Get your butt back in gear.

Do you realize what is possible in 125 days? Yea, it would be nice if you could just continue off the momentum of the past 240 days, but if they haven’t been as productive as they should have been, don’t give up on the year. 

Why do people give up on their goals?

Why is it that someone can get so excited about the goals they want to achieve and then just give up on them?

If you’ve ever been one who set some goals but eventually gave up on them, maybe by recognizing some of these reasons that people quit on their goals will help you the next time to follow all the way thought.

This is by no means the full list of why people give up on their goals, but these are the most common reasons that I’ve seen.

They Care Too Much About What Other People Think

Have you ever been so excited about something that you just can’t wait to tell someone about it? You think it’s an awesome idea and you just can’t wait to share it because you know everyone else will feel the same way as you do. Then with all of your excitement you tell someone and they respond with something like:

“That’s a stupid idea… You could never do that… Yea right, quit dreaming…”

That’s tough. It hurts, it’s deflating. But you can’t let the thoughts or comments from others defeat you. If you believe in something and you really desire it, you have to be ready to deal with negative feedback in a way that won’t throw you off course of discourage you.

Check out Richie Norton’s book, The Power of Starting Something Stupid if you need some encouragement with your “stupid” ideas.

Failure and Discouragement

If you set your goals and you’re working hard to achieve them, does that make you immune to failure? Of course not. When you are working hard towards your goals but you fail, it’s tough. Maybe you’re discouraged. Maybe even embarrassed.

 At this point many people tell themselves they gave it their best and it just wasn’t good enough.  It’s over.

But it’s not over. All that you did was figured out a way that it wasn’t going to work. Keep your head high and get back to work.

It’s Too Hard

Some people get discouraged when they start to work on their goal and realize that it’s going to be a lot harder than they thought it would be. It’s going to take some work.
When it gets hard some people give up just because they lack the discipline to see it through. Some just don’t want it bad enough.

Focus on your goal and create that burning desire that will help you get through every obstacle and keep you excited when things get tough.

Self Doubt

Mindset is everything.

If you want to achieve your goals, you have to have a belief in yourself that you can do it.

You have to be able to kick the self-doubt thoughts out of your mind. 

You will be amazed at what you can accomplish if you just believe in yourself.

“In order for the transformation of ideas into things to work, a certain amount of belief is required; a certain mindset that lets you know in your heart that you can, and will, achieve what you set out to do.”

– Napoleon Hill


For the next 125 days, get control over these four things that can stop you or make you give up on your goals. 

Maybe you’re starting from scratch. Who cares. Just start. 

In 125 days the year 2020 is going to be here whether you get back on track with your goals or not. On that day are you going to wish you had continued working on your goals or are you going to be proud because you worked so hard on your goals whether you achieved them or not?

Join one of our calls with a FREE trial membership to our Inner Circle Mastermind HERE to learn how to set and stick to your goals while being accountable to other like-minded high achievers.

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The Greatest Teacher

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How do you perform under pressure? How do you perform under emotional pressure? When something goes wrong, you’ve failed, how do you react?

As a basketball coach I have to admit that I have had experiences when things were not going right and things got emotional, and I didn’t respond in the best way. If a referee makes a bad call in a basketball game that has a negative impact on my team at a key point in the game, will it make things better for us if I lose my mind on the ref? Is there a chance if I scream and yell that maybe he will apologize and change his call? Of course not.

But on the other hand what negative could come from it? To begin with, that negative emotion is absorbed by my team. I’m showing my team, through my actions, what is acceptable. The referee isn’t going to be looking to give me any breaks or do me any favors going forward, maybe even beyond this one game. 

I’m not writing this to talk about basketball referees and how you should react if they make a call you don’t agree with. What I want to look at is how we can take all of our experiences, both good and bad, and learn from them so that when we face a similar circumstance in the future we will be prepared to deal with it in the best possible way. 

Whether we are in a team environment or as an individual we can look at both our good and bad experiences and learn from them. In both cases there are emotions tied to the experience that we need to be able to work around. In a positive outcome we may be flooded with positive emotions that give us the false belief that everything went right and we don’t have to think anymore about it. In a negative outcome you may feel that nothing went right and you don’t even want to think about it anymore. But the reality is that we have much to learn from both outcomes that can transform our futures.

As an individual, as a family, as a business or as a team this is an exercise that could have a major impact on your future outcomes. 

After an event, either positive or negative, take the time to learn from it. Capture what the situation was, what are the facts? What about it wasn’t great and could get better? What worked? Strategize about how to make sure it happens for the better next time. 

Dan Sullivan talks about “The Greatest Teacher”  in his podcast INSIDE Strategic Coach. He suggests making three small boxes on a piece of paper to work through the situation:

  1. What Worked – This should open the flood gates and allow everyone to appreciate the there were things that worked
  2. What Needs to Improve – Here you can identify the problems, the things that didn’t work, so that you can improve on them for the future
  3. Strategies for the Future – This will make you alert to all situations in the future. You may not have an identical situation, but by going through this exercise you will be aware of how you can apply this experience to others situations in the future 

Dan says that by going through this process you can create a positive momentum for the future and not be bogged down by the past. 

In my basketball example I have two opportunities to go through this. First I could sit down with my assistant coaches and have a discussion and secondly I could go through the process with my team. This would allow us to look at the situation and the outcome. It would allow us as coaches and as a team to strategies on how we would react to a similar situation in the future which will hopefully bring us a better outcome.

Today in the entrepreneurial world failure is often looked at almost as a badge of honor. We hear the quotes: 

“Fail Fast”

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again”

“Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success”

“Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something”

The last quote in this list is key because for anything good to come out of failure, we have to learn from our mistakes. Otherwise, failure is just failure. 

As I have mentioned earlier, this is an exercise that should be used after both successful and unsuccessful outcomes so that we can learn from each of them. But this is an exercise that will allow us to look at our failures to learn from them so that we can be successful in the future. 

“Your experience when you’re having intense [positive or negative] emotions is the greatest teacher you can possibly have. Channel it and you’ll always come up with amazing breakthroughs.”

– Dan Sullivan

If you’d like to learn more about our mastermind groups where as a collective group we help each other learn from our combined experiences click the button below:

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Book Quote of the Week – 123

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Struggle is not optional – it’s neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit sub optimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit – i.e., practicing – in order to keep myelin functioning properly.

Daniel Coyle

Fail and Learn

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Failure is such a common word when people talk about entrepreneurship. We hear things like, fail fast or fail often. It’s a known thing, all business don’t succeed. Things happen that are out of the entrepreneurs control. A good idea doesn’t work out because of an outside force or situation. Or a business fails because it was a bad idea from the beginning. Maybe it was a good idea but it was poorly executed. Whatever the matter, some businesses fail.
As an entrepreneur I am well aware that failure is part of business. But a lot of entrepreneurs think like I have, that failure is something that happens with other people’s businesses. Sometimes, as hard as it might be, failure is the best option, or the only option. I have operated in situations with the attitude that failure is not an option and in the long run it was a mistake. In those situations I believe that if I would have allowed myself to fail I would have been able to pivot and get back on track a lot sooner than I had by trying to keep something going that should have failed sooner.
The most important part of failure is the lessons learned. I hope that the future will show that I have learned from my mistakes and moving forward can be a better entrepreneur because of it.