The truth is being successful is hard. You won't love every subject that you study. You won't click with every teacher that you have. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right at this minute. And you won't necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try. That's okay. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures. JK Rowling, who wrote Harry Potter. Her first Harry Potter book was rejected
12 times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. He lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games.
26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.
I've failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.
Failure,
in my opinion, failure is 100%
necessary
for greatness.
To to achieve greatness, to to have that success, you've gotta fail as many times as possible. So don't shy away from it and don't take it as a negative. Every single successful person has achieved great things, it's climbing Mount Everest, whether it's getting to a top of a company, whether it's being the best athlete possible, they've all failed more times than they'll be able to remember. But through those lessons that they've learned through those failures, that's how they've become great. No one's been great from the get go and then just being great. That's except for Superman. If you don't fail,
you're not even trying. I'll say it again. If you don't fail, you're not even trying. My wife told me this great expression. To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did. You could spend your whole life imagining ghosts,
worrying about the pathway to the future,
but all there will ever be is what's happening here. And the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear. So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.
What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dare to ask the universe for it. I'm saying,
I'm the proof
that you can ask the universe for it. My father could have been a great comedian but he didn't believe that that was possible for him. And so he made a conservative choice.
Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant and when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don't, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.
I have failed far more times than I've succeeded, far more. You would never succeed more than you fail. That's not how it works. You know why? Because failure is a wonderful teacher. It's the only way to learn. You have to fail. Failure is a part of the process to becoming successful. I tell people this all the time. Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player in the world, he took 946
game winning shots. 946
times since he was in high school, the ball has been in his hand to take the game winning shot with no time on the clock. He has only made a 146
of them. He has missed over 700 times, but he has made a 146.
You know what they write about? When you make it. They write about when you make it. So guess what? When you get to failing, failing, failing, failing, all you gotta do is make one. When you had that third failure in a row,
did you think I need to pack this in? Never.
Why not?
I don't ever give up. In the history of space flight, only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully
brought it back to the earth. The United States, Russia,
China,
and Elon Musk. Don't ever give up.
You need to change your mind because some of you are thinking about giving up because you're in a season of failure. But just because you failed doesn't mean that God doesn't have a bright future in store for you. It is always too soon to quit. But I wanna remind you that failure
is not final, it's formative. It is part of the process. Process.
It's part of the journey.
Your failure matters as much as your success.
How do you think you're gonna grow if you don't ever fail?
Yet some of you have failed and you have decided, guess what, I'm a failure. No, failure is an event. It is never a person.
Just because you failed doesn't mean that you're a failure. In fact, failure is actually fuel for your future, the way that you grow, the way that you advance. You have to fail in order to succeed. Like every one of my successes
is stacked on top of failure. You need to get a revelation today that the joy is not in the success. The joy is in trying. The joy is in the process. There are lessons
only failure can teach you. There is knowledge
that only can be gained
through losses.
There is information
you can only acquire
through shut doors and people telling you no. In our process,
sometimes we give up a little too quick. Sometimes when the road gets a little too hard and the hurdles get a little too frequent and the mountain gets a little too tall, we no longer want to continue the journey. But you need to persevere, you need the tenacity, you need the grit, and you need the commitment
so that by the time you make it to the finish line, you have learned all that you need to learn to succeed. Go make a mistake.
Go fail. We were raised to play it safe.
To color inside the lines. To only move when we are sure it will work. That's why so many people never building anything great. They're still waiting for permission to try. But the truth is failure is data. It's feedback. It's speed. Every failure tells you what doesn't work and that's how you find what does. Successful people are not smarter.
They've just failed a 100 times more than the most people have tried. They've learned their lessons because even failure has to be earned. You can't fail if you never try. And if you ever never try, you can't win either. No one is going to give you permission because no one has that power.
So if no one ever told you it's okay to try and mess up, it's actually great. Go try, go fail, go learn, fail fast, learn faster. That's how you win. When you start doubting yourself, that's very dangerous.
Because now what you're basically saying is is that if my plan doesn't work,
I have a fallback plan. I have a plan b. The reason, one of the main reasons why people want to have a plan b is because they are worried about failing. What is if I fail then I don't have anything else? Well, let me tell you something. Don't be afraid of failing because there's nothing wrong with failing. You have to fail in order to climb that ladder. There's no one that doesn't fail. There is no success without failure. They they go hand in hand And with the failure comes amazing lessons,
adjustments.
And you get sharper because of the shit that you've done wrong or that you didn't know to approach a certain way that you now know how to approach. I embrace the concept of failure just as much as I embrace
the win of success. This is what's difficult about failure.
The disappointment
is on you.
It is your fault,
and you go through failure alone, but failure
has made me who I am today. Failure gives you two choices, you stay down or you get up. Well, I'm up and I am fired up because I have figured it out.