Want to be Successful - Try, Fail, and Then Recognise the Pattern

Making money by “thinking” is easy making money on its own is not

Have you tried and failed at anything lately? You will need to, and identify why you failed if you want to be successful.

I met up with a friend a couple of days ago, we hadn’t seen each other for sometime and we were eager to catch up on how the other was doing. We talked about everything, family, making money, running a business and life in general.

One of the things that came up during our chat was what I term “Pattern Recognition” -- the act of taking in raw data and taking action based on the category of the data. For you a simple definition would be the ability to identify patterns from personal experience.

Why did this come up in our discussion? Well, Bob runs his business, and is now enjoying seeing it do well. But it hasn’t always been like that, he had tried various businesses, all of which failed and especially in the early stages.

However his perseverance kept him going, working on finding a process that worked. He had his mind set on taking control of his life and he wasn’t going to give up on accomplishing his dream. Bob now has a successful business and he plans to grow it using what he has learnt.

Ask yourself why he did not stop at the second or third attempt. My guess is most of us would probably have stopped trying after the first attempt. For many it doesn’t make sense to keep on failing, so we stop, not knowing victory is just around the corner.

Here lies the difference between successful people and those who never seem to achieve anything. They realise failing most often depends on the systems or processes that people employ, and not on the people themselves. In other words, people don’t fail, systems fail, and so in order to be successful, you must closely examine your approach to this goal.

Common among the most successful is this ability to recognise patterns of failure, while understanding that failure remains only a variation of success. This small group of individuals recognise the value of persistence in finding the right combination or formula in order to achieve what they want.

You could say that success - material, emotional, spiritual - in life depends on your ability:

• to welcome failure and learn from it

• to make good, effective decisions based on previous experiences

• to be persistent.

By consciously identifying your patterns of success and failure, you can become a master at building an effective system of personal growth. However, you will have to start by trying and if you fail, know why you failed, then try again.