I read a great article (that I can no longer find) by Wharton Professor and best-selling author, Adam Grant.
Discussing his new book on people who champion new ideas and change the world, he provocatively states—when I asked people like Elon Musk and Larry Page about starting their own companies their answers caught me off guard.
As he wrote, “They all felt the same fear of failure that the rest of us do. They just responded to it differently.”
In effect, they don’t allow the fear of failure to hold them back from taking action, but they are more concerned about failing to take action.
In his original Personal Power program recorded some thirty years ago, Tony Robbins talks about the rules we invent for ourselves that govern our lives.
Discussing a corporate training session he was running, he asked the CEO, “Do you consider yourself successful?”
Surprisingly to Tony and the room, he said, “No,” before going on to state his rules for what it means to be successful—I must have more money, less body fat, and so on.
Then Tony turned to another man in the room, a much more junior employee and asked, “Sir, do you think you are successful?” The man immediately responded, “Yes, every day I am above ground I am successful…”
Tony then went on to share his own personal rule for failure—I can only fail if I give up, as long as I keep working at it, I am successful.
Do you see how by just changing a rule you have previously invented that you can change the way you perceive major things in your life?
And, now, here’s the key to this topic of rules.
Just because Tony Robbins or Larry Page or Elon Musk or anyone else live by certain rules doesn’t mean that they are the right rules for you.
It’s up to you what rules you live by, what matters most is that you know the rules you have already set and that you are in charge of changing them.