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TOM@RICHHABITS.NET
Failure is not the opposite of success. It is a stepping-stone to success.
In my Rich Habits Study, failure and mistakes were the price of admission into the world of success. I spent five years studying 233 wealthy individuals and 128 people living in poverty. Of the wealthy, 177 were self-made.
One of the four paths those self-made millionaires in my Study took was the Dreamer-Entrepreneur Path. It was the hardest path. It was also the fastest and the most financially rewarding: an average of $7.4 million in about twelve years.
That speed and abundance of wealth came with bruises.
Thirty-four percent of the self-made millionaires in my Study failed in business at least once. Ninety-one percent of Dreamer-Entrepreneur millionaires faced ongoing adversity, problems, obstacles and setbacks.
Those numbers are not a warning to stay employed. They are a description of the Entrepreneurial Path.
Unsuccessful entrepreneurs, the ones who quit, treat failure as a verdict. One bad quarter, one lost partner, one product that did not sell, and they packed up the tent and found a job.
The successful treated failure as tuition. They paid in money, time, reputation, worry, stress, family time, friend time and sleep. Eighty-four percent of wealthy entrepreneurs in my Study refused to quit on their dreams and their goals. When things went off the rails, they figured out what went wrong and pivoted until their figured out what works.
When a strategy or process did not work, they pivoted by changing the strategy or the process. They kept changing what they did but they never changed the dream. The dream was their Why. It was the reason they could endure the gut punches for so many years.
This is why emotional control showed up again and again in my Rich Habits Study data.
Ninety-four percent of the wealthy vetted what they said before they spoke or acted. Failure floods the brain with fear, anger, and embarrassment. If those emotions run the company, the next decision is usually the worst one. The successful used a simple process I saw over and over:
Think. Evaluate. React.
Many slept on a problem. Sleep restored the emotional center of their brains back to its baseline, giving control back to their analytical brain. Then, without emotion, they figured out the problem and took immediate action to remedy it.
Failure also forced the successful entrepreneurs in my Study to adopt certain Rich Habits that they would have never otherwise adopted.
- They became ruthless about cutting costs and living below their means because, to an entrepreneur, working capital is oxygen.
- They got serious about daily learning, because the market had just graded their existing knowledge.
- They sought out and forged relationships with power brokers and influencers inside their industry, because one Power Relationship can help them fix a problem or open a door that had been shut to them for years.
- They exercised, because a twelve-year path cannot be run on a broken body.
Setbacks forced them to pivot and adopt habits that improved their odds of success.
If you are in the middle of a failure right now, you are paying that tuition to become successful.
And that tuition is a cost every successful entrepreneur pays.
Tom Corley is an accountant, financial planner and author of “Rich Kids: How to Raise Our Children to Be Happy and Successful in Life”, “Effort-Less Wealth”, “Change Your Habits Change Your Life”, “Rich Habits Poor Habits”, “Rich Habits: The Routines Millionaires Use Daily to Build Wealth” and “Rich Habits Wealth Academy.”
