Mentor and renowned professional speaker “David Brett-Williams” is a beacon of inspiration. He travels the world training some of the top CEO’s and executives on how to become an effective leader.
David Brett-Williams’ quotes and lessons are floating all over social media channels and motivational videos.
Here are the Top 16 Inspirational Lessons Quotes and lessons by David Brett-Williams on failure.
1. Being afraid to learn from your mistakes, increases the likelihood you will keep repeating them.
Every one of us is capable of repeating the same mistakes over and over. The reason is that when we get stressed, we tend to retreat to habits formed in childhood.
And when the regulatory processes of our prefrontal cortex get overtaxed physically or mentally by stress, then habits rule. So we see child-like habits of impulsiveness, poor judgment, and self-obsession.
The advances in technology in our everyday life create overstimulation and information overload. This, in turn, causes us to repeat mistakes.
2. A measure of success is how we cope with the disappointment of failure.
The reality is that those people who achieve great things have, at some point, chosen to embrace failure versus allowing it to hold them back.
How we respond to failure paves our way to success and allows us to excel.
In the grand perspective of our lives, failures are rarely fatal, and the vast majority are unimportant.
There will always be another company to buy, another great prospect to meet, another race to run.
The deciding factor is your attitude to the inevitable knocks. Because in every disaster, there is a precious element of experience.
3. Success tends to breeds complacency. Complacency tends to breed failure. Only the perpetually hungry survive.
Regrettably, the earliest hints of success makes many people satisfied. They lose the desire to put in the extra effort, the hard work that produced that success.
When the desire fades then the success will also fade. The way to ensure continued success is to set challenging goals and when you attain them set another goal rather than become complacent.
And that is precisely what being perpetually hungry does for you. You put in the hard work, the extra effort to reach your goals.
4. The humbling issue about failure is your acknowledgement that you’re not as good as you thought you were.
I am familiar with stupid mistakes. I might have written the book on screwing up. All right, not really, but sometimes it sure feels like that.
If the veneer of a well-designed website somehow misled you, I don’t have all my stuff figured out. Just wanted to set the record straight.
I disappoint the people I love, am often late for meetings and regret the really stupid stuff I say. The stupid stuff passes without regret.
I wish it weren’t this way, but despite my best efforts, it seems sometimes I can’t get it right.
This does not mean I am resigned to my mistakes. I know I can grow. This is just me being real and inviting you into the truth.
We all fall short, we all betray our consciences and let down those who matter most to us. And these things are not okay. But that is not the end of the story unless you want it to be.
Our struggles don’t define us. But they can help us grow. Accept that you are not as good as you thought you were and resolve to improve.
5. Get out there and make mistakes. Make new mistakes, ones that nobody has ever made before.
If you are out there making mistakes, then you are trying new things, making new things. You are learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, and changing your world.
You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you are active, and you are doing something.
Get out there and make new mistakes. Make great, glorious mistakes. Don’t stop, freeze, don’t worry that it might not be good enough, whatever it is: family or work or life.
Whatever it is that you are scared of doing, do it. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.
6. You can let your failures teach you or define you.
No one who is a failure. The predicament is that when you say you are something, it begins to manifests itself.
It forms part of who you are, how you think and feel, and what you do. Failure is what happens to you, not who you are.
We will all fail at some point. We will fail in business, relationships, and sports. It’s how life was designed to be.
Importantly, it is up to you to define what failure means to you.
7. Success depends on preparation, without preparation there is a good chance of failure.
Success is all about preparation. Preparation is all about discipline, hard work, sacrifice, consistency, and more. This often quoted sports maxim comes to mind, “The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.”
Most of us have the will to win, but only very few are willing to put in the hard work and time necessary to become great. The greater challenge is that you can’t prepare to win once and then just let success flow.
Achievers possess the will to prepare to win over and over again.
If you are not prepared to meet a challenge, then you have little chance of succeeding.
8. Negative results are just as valuable to me as positive ones. Until I find the things that don’t do the job, I can never find the thing that does.
While negative results are painful, they serve a valuable purpose. They show us what is not working so we can refine our approach to get the positive results that we desire.
Grit and perseverance are keys to achieving success in any endeavour. We will all face moments of doubt, and the achievers are the ones who somehow find the inner resolve to keep going.
Take the time to learn from the negative results and persevere in finding ways that do the job. That get the results that you want.
9. A moment of success repays years of failure.
Success is about overcoming adversity and not about being ambitious. Being ambitious, that is easy. What separates the winners from the losers is how they handle disappointment.
In striving to achieve, you will suffer setbacks. Similar to thunder following lightning. If nothing is ventured, nothing is gained.
Know that no one triumphs every time, and the more attempts you make, the more failures you will suffer, as well as victories. And that one victory will make all the failures worth it.
10. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback and learning.
Success is a great word. It means so much, and it’s a word that many find inspiring and motivating. And amazingly, it has different meanings to every person on this planet.
One thing we all have in common though, the word failure is something that we all fear. No one wants to fail. No one likes to fail. However, failure can lead to greater success.
It all comes down to what you learn from your failure and your perspective. Take responsibility for the result and evaluate it so you can take the feedback into your next endeavour.
11. Reframe failure as time-released success.
We will all experience failure in our lives, whether we’ve lost a major client, been rejected from a top school, or filed for divorce. No one enjoys failure, but it’s impossible to avoid.
Failure is important, and I would argue an essential, step towards success. To use failure to our advantage, rather than letting it get in the way of achieving our goals, recognise that you failed and that it’s okay.
12. Failure is a bruise, not a scar.
We fail. We make mistakes. A vital lesson we all need to learn is to know failure is a bruise and not a scar. We heal from the bruises and continue.
Failure can be foggy, and we can find clarity. Failure defines our character. Our true character is reflected in the immediate actions following any credibility challenge.
Failure can be character building. Failure occurs, but we decide what we want our legacy to be.
13. Everyone understands failure, after all, everybody does it all the time.
Sometimes the same lesson gets presented many times before we learn from it. Stop thinking of life as a checklist.
Life is a practice. Everything in life takes practice.
Things tend to decay if left ignored . Doing something once does not mean it will happen again. The fact that you were once great at something does not mean you will be great at it forever.
Some of life’s hardest and most challenging lessons repeat themselves over and over again. And the onus is on every one of us to be mindful enough to witness them happening in that moment. So that this time around, we can make a different decision.
14. It is our strategies that are to blame for our failures. After all, we are responsible for the good and the bad in our life.
There is a foundational principle that you must embrace if you plan for happiness and success in your life and work. The only way to achieve your dreams is to take responsibility for your life.
For many of us, it is always someone else’s fault. It is never down to us. Every problem gets explained away with reasons why they were unable to influence or affect the situation or the outcome.
You and you alone are responsible for your life.
Lurking beside every failure is a scapegoat that we can use to avoid taking responsibility for our actions. That scapegoat ensures failure is never the result of the choices we made.
Time to stop making excuses. Those excuses fuel dysfunctional thinking and as a direct consequence fuel undesirable actions and behaviours.
The hallmark of people who fail to succeed both in their personal and professional lives is making excuses instead of taking 100% responsibility for your actions, your thoughts, and your goals.
The next time you hear yourself making an excuse, catch yourself. Then gently remind yourself that there are no excuses.
15. To learn from mistakes, we must not hide them, especially not from ourselves.
Most of us know that forgiveness is a good thing. The act of forgiving frees us from anger and bitterness and anger. Two negative emotions that hold us back from all the outstanding things we might achieve and experience.
Pat on the back for all of your work on forgiving others. But what about forgiving ourselves?
Forgiving ourselves is often very difficult. To avoid that uncomfortable process we hide from our failures and in doing so remove the opportunity to learn from our mistakes.
Forgiving yourself allows you to make better decisions. All those self-justifications that you engage in warp reality. The more you use self-justifications, the more warped reality becomes.
This alternate universe you create leads to a decreased ability to make good choices, as the information you’re using to base your decisions on is distorted.
If you had been able to see the people and pursuits clearly for what they were, it would have helped you.
16. Because you failed this time doesn’t mean you’re going to fail every time.
There is freedom in learning how to use failure to your advantage.
We all fail. Let that sink in for a moment. All of us fail.
If you’re an achiever, forging a new path, then at some point you will fail. The reality is that it is inevitable.
But realise that whether that failure is small or large, there is something to be gained. Failure is not the end. It isn’t a total loss.
Let’ look at the numbers, 40% of all businesses will fail in the first three years they’re open. That’s a lot of failing going on.
So you get through the first three years, and then it is plain sailing. Not at all. The next risk period for a new business is between 3 to 5 years. That period shows a sharp decline in the number of companies operating.
Successful people fail. And yes, please read that again. It is not an oxymoron. Successful people fail.
Failure is an option, failure is always an option.
Failure is frequently, but mistakenly, viewed as an ending. However, that doesn’t have to be the case.
For those with resilience, failure is just the beginning. If you find yourself faced with failure, it’s time to shift gears and find a solution to the problem.
Maybe you need to start from scratch again. If so, that’s perfectly acceptable. One of my first business’ failed, but here I am, still standing and then some.
But why? I diligently examined the problems with my first business and ensured that what I learned from that experience influenced my future decisions.
