..Lacking persistence.
I won’t drone on and on about the punchline, only to deliver it at the end of this piece.
If you lack persistence, you will give up after the first failure. And you will fail at some point, no doubt. But that’s okay – failure is the best teacher. Failure tells us what we did wrong and adds a bit of ‘ouch’ to it so that message sticks. We remember the failure because it’s painful, and that’s exactly what we want, because we can leverage that new knowledge and emotion to allow ourselves to achieve new heights.
This all came about from my radical life change – specifically trying to find a new full time gig while my two businesses grow. A few weeks ago I met someone who needed a tech guy, I applied, the job seemed like it was something just outside of my reach, but they offered my a face to face interview.
I figured that if the company was willing to invest an hour of time with 3 people then I must be at least a consideration! Good news! Full of jubilation, I went to the interview. ‘Look at you,’ I thought to myself, ‘just a few weeks ago you wanted a new job, and here you are getting one!’
Then I blew the interview. I just didn’t have the technical knowledge needed to fill the position.
Ugh. Stress. Despair. The feeling that I will be stuck in my current position forever – I will never progress beyond the point I’m at now.
This feeling, I realize now as I write this, is totally normal. But don’t linger there for too long. In fact, try to figure out the shortest amount of lingering you need to do (it’s probably less than 5 minutes) before you act on your next step.
My next step was contacting a recruiter I was working with and asking about any new opportunities they were trying to fill. As it turns out, they have one that I’m a(nother) near perfect fit for. They called me this afternoon and I’ve got another phone interview lined up later this week.
If I didn’t have a next step, and if I didn’t push myself past that dreadful feeling of complete failure, then I would have truly failed.
You don’t fail until you let yourself fail.
Truth. Are you going to accept failure? Never. Now get back up, dust yourself off, and act on your next step!
What important lessons has failure taught you?
(Note: Since this article was written I’ve actually found pleasure in my current job again (I was persistent in my quest to improve my situation in one way or another). I’ve been employing some techniques I learned at David Delp’s http://pilotfire.com- He’s a brilliant dude. Check him out!)
