Schultz on Lucky Misses

 

“Life is a series of near misses. But a lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future.”

– Howard Schultz (1953 – )

American entrepreneur, chairman of Starbucks

One thing that’s helpful to me when I catch myself shying away from taking a risk…

I remember that I’m not so important that a mistake or failure will likely have any lengthy impact or be that difficult to overcome with a little extra effort and time. (If you happen to be a head of state, a Supreme Court Justice, or a military general, maybe you need to be a little more careful.)

Bonaparte on Owning It

 

“Circumstances! I make circumstances!”

–Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)
French general and emperor

 

resilience: noun: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change (from Merriam-Webster)

We all fail from time-to-time (our doing, someone else’s doing, something else’s doing, a combination of each). It’s life.

To be resilient…

  1. Focus on results. Embrace the fact that results are what we’re all really after. Effort and attempts are great first steps, but we need to act with commitment to delivering (just like we want people to do for us).
  2. Make lessons of failures. Minimize the tendency to make a failure or mistake anything more than a lesson on how not to do something. We need to learn from our mistakes and truly accept them as tuition for succeeding later. And yes… Our mistakes might put us in a bind at times and have some uncomfortable consequences but again, that’s real life.
  3. Continue on. Smarter.
  4. Reinforce. Support each other (and ourselves) by continually reminding and encouraging one another to deliver on the first three points.

 

Teresa on The Daring

 

“Life is an adventure, dare it.”

–Mother Teresa (1910–1997)
Albanian missionary
Nobel Peace Prize winner

One thing that’s helpful to me when I catch myself shying away from taking a risk…

I remember that I’m not so important that a mistake or failure will likely have any lengthy impact or be that difficult to overcome with a little extra effort and time. (If you happen to be a head of state, a Supreme Court Justice, or a military general, maybe you need to be a little more careful. Of course, I’m fairly confident you’re not getting SalesQuotes.)
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