Failure Must Be Your Friend

Most people are fooled into the belief that living your life purpose should be easy. They feel that if they could just find their God-given talent and be able to live it that live would flow much better. Well, it does and it doesn’t.

         Living a life of purpose often entails great big things. It definitely will call you to live outside of your comfort zone and to accept that you can do much more than you have ever conceived. The tricky part is that since you haven’t lived your life purpose fully, up until the point at which you take the plunge, you haven’t practiced your skills much or haven’t polished the way in which you’re going to live it. Therefore, you will be met with failure.

         Many people look at failure as the end. You might be one of them. I know I had a hard time with failure for many years. I felt failure was the ultimate rejection from the universe that told me I was of little value. Now, I look at failure as the universe’s way of telling me, “Not yet.”

         In the limelight, we see people who are successful. We see people like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling, Mark Zuckerberg and many other wealthy successful people and we may be inclined to think, “Boy, they have it easy.” What we don’t see is the numerous times they had to fail to get to where they are today. Every single successful person who makes his or her way to the history books failed many times before becoming a success. I love the story of Sylvester Stallone told on Get The Edge by Tony Robbins. Stallone was rejected as an actor 1,500 times before he wrote the script for Rocky. He was so broke he even had to sell his dog. Then when he went to sell his script, he got offered $125,000 by United Artists but only if he wouldn’t star in the film. He refused and went on to make a compromise to only be paid $35,000 if he could star in it. Henry Ford went bankrupt five times before creating his Model T successfully. Walt Disney went bankrupt several times before creating Disneyland. Thomas Edison failed 1,000 times before creating the light bulb.

         If you want to live out your life’s purpose (as you well should), get used to failure. Failure must become your best friend until you succeed. You must embrace it, love it, learn from it, welcome it, and not let it shut you down.

         You must have the tenacity, persistence and perseverance to push through disappointments, rejection, and failed attempts and living out your life’s purpose.

         I have lived this experience time and again. When I first self-published The Wheel of Healing, I submitted a proposal to Barnes & Noble to ask to have the book on the shelves. Within a few weeks, I had received a rejection letter. At my book launch on May 3, 2014, for The Wheel of Healing, I shared the rejection letter with the thirteen or fourteen people who showed up to the book launch party. I said because of this rejection, I would not only have book in Barnes & Noble but also would sell at least 1 million copies of my book to prove that they were wrong. Well, one year later in May 2015, my book was on the shelves at Barnes & Noble and published by New World Library.  Another more recent experience happened with Whole Foods Market. I had tried back in 2014 to get my book on the shelves at one Whole Foods Market in Fair Lakes, VA. The people in charge of mind body health at that Whole Foods were excited to carry my book and do a book launch at this very busy store. However, I had to go through corporate, fill out all the paperwork and carry insurance on the book, which cost me a lot of money. Then, there was a long delay with corporate, over a year. It got so expensive to carry the insurance that I had to drop it and when Whole Foods Corporate finally got back to me, I didn’t have the necessary insurance coverage they required. Just this past week, I got a message from New World Library that Whole Foods Market bought over 1,200 copies of my book to distribute to, not one, but to all of their stores.

         Never give up on your dreams and purpose based on one failure or even 1,000 failures, if you do, you just might be denying yourself success.

Love,

Michelle