Never Be Afraid to Fail

In this series I’ve been talking about what prevents someone from joining a network marketing company, and a very common thought people have is they are afraid to fail.

It’s not just that the person is afraid to fail. Oftentimes, they also have a second thought which is they are afraid of another person seeing them fail.  

I Failed My Way to Success

I promise you, I failed my way to success. It’s the only way I succeeded. I did not just make it. I failed my way to success. 

If you’re afraid to fail, you’ll likely not start. 

You won’t produce. 

When you do start, you’ll likely quit when you think you’re close to failing, or at the first failure. That might be when you’re trying to call a customer or prospect.

The correct mindset I found that I have to have is: When I fail, I learn.

With that mindset, what I’m saying to myself is, “Oh, I most absolutely will fail. Not all the time though. And each time that I do, I’ll learn from it.” 

We call that an “After Action Report,” which is after a win or a lose, write it up. What did we do well? What do we need to work on? That’s it. If you do that, then you are going to become a winner eventually, no matter what. 

To Experience A YES, You Must Be Willing to Experience a NO

See this goofy kid? This is me a lot of years ago. Do you think I wasn’t afraid to go and knock on people’s doors and ask them if I could mow their lawn? 

Oh my gosh, I was so afraid! 

But I was afraid of something worse, which was that all the kids laughed at me at school because of my tennis shoes. 

I had cheap K-Mart tennis shoes and I was laughed at, and the only way that I could get better shoes would be to go and earn money on my own. 

And so I had to knock on doors. I was so scared that it took me forever. I would look at the steps and up to where the door was. I had to walk up the stairs, and dogs were barking and all kinds of stuff. 

I wanted to run. 

I knocked on the door and nobody answered, so I went to the next one, and the next one. I went to the next one, and nobody was there at every door. 

And then eventually, some guy happened to be there. He was in a duplex and I knocked on the door. He came to the door and looked at me.

I said, “You wouldn’t want me to mow your yard, would you?” 

He looked back in the house at his TV. Then he looked back and said, “You need to perfect your sales pitch. You ought to say something a little bit more like, ‘Would you like to keep on watching TV and let me mow your yard?’ If you said something like that, then it would be more interesting.” 

I said, “Would you?” 

He said, “Yeah.” 

And so he sold himself. There’s your power of one. 

If you can get one customer, you can get a million. 

That is the mindset that you’ve got to have. I did that and I ended up knocking on about 300 doors and I got 30 customers that I was able to service over the years. 

They bought my tennis shoes. They bought my Levi Strauss jeans. They bought my belt buckle that I wanted. They bought my Letterman jacket.  Yes, I was afraid, but I had to step out anyway. 

You have to be able to step out and put yourself out there.

To experience a YES, you must be willing to experience a NO. 

That’s going to be a theme that I want to share with you through a few examples, and I really, really want you to get it, because I want you to succeed as I have. 

You just have to remember that you can’t experience a yes if you’re unwilling to experience a no. You have to be willing to experience both of them. 

To Experience BEING ELITE, You Must Be Willing to Experience BEING CUT 

Do you think I wasn’t afraid? This guy right here is a Squid. That’s what they call us in the Navy. 

I would see these guys working on the sides of ships, and they were really cool. 

They wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and short pants, and had a knife strapped to their calf. I thought they were the coolest people I’d ever seen in my life. I wanted to be one, but they were way outside my altitude. They were way up in the stratosphere for me. 

I wanted to be one of them, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t think I could be one of them, but I wanted to.

To experience BEING ELITE, you must be willing to experience BEING CUT. 

I got about 600 NOs every time I submitted a request chit to be accepted into this group – to even try out for this group. You have to be willing to be cut if you want to be elite. Be cut from the team, not accepted, whatever it is. 

To Experience the Thrill of Victory, You Must Be Willing to Experience the Agony of Defeat 

Do you think I wasn’t afraid of jumping out of the back of that helicopter or the back of that airplane into water? 

Do you think I wasn’t afraid to be on the ocean floor where that hose right there is my air? If the compressor went out, guess what? I’m sitting down there in a 200 lb rig. I couldn’t get out of that rig. You can’t take that helmet off. You have to experience it. 

How about defusing the bombs? Do you think I wasn’t afraid of dragging a bomb in the Gulf? You don’t think I was afraid for my buddy? 

True brotherhood in the military is when you’re willing to give up your life with honor, so that that man lives and can carry on his future. I know he thinks the same about me.

To experience the thrill of victory, you must be willing to experience the agony of defeat. 

Was I afraid? Yeah. Every time I jumped into the water, every time I went out on a mission with my buddies. Of course. 

To Experience Love, You Must Be Willing to Experience a Broken Heart 

This was the biggest fear. Do you think I wasn’t afraid when I had the most abrupt, rude, unthought-out conversation on a driveway with this girl? 

It was for me, having the last name of Sales (that is my real last name – I didn’t change it), I sure flubbed that one up. Because she made me nervous. 

She was my true dream. 

Here she is at our wedding. Cowboy boots are a big deal for me. We have two children together. 

To experience love, you must be willing to experience a broken heart. 

Yeah, it’s a lot of risk. It’s scary. It’s a lot of girlfriends, and then once you do get married, it’s something like 60/40. 60% get a divorce, and 40% stay together or something like that. That’s a huge risk. You’ve got to be able to experience both the broken heart and love in order to have true love. It’s the only way it happens. 

To Experience a Gain, You Must Be Willing to Experience a Loss 

While I’ve been writing this series, I have a stock trading report in the background. 

This year to date in my closed positions, I’ve lost $19,900 on one position. I’ve lost $12,000 on another, $2,000 on another, and $1,703 on another. 

But I gained $1900, $2000, $2000, $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,050, and $1,000 on other closed positions. Do you see? I gained overall 9% in a quarter (three months). Over here in the open positions, I’m up $190,000.

To experience a gain, you must be willing to experience a loss. 

Do you know how few people are willing to lose $20,000? That’s the whole point. But it’s not just, “Oh, well I lost all my money.” No, no, no, no. You have to do the After Action Report every single time you have a loss or a win and say, “What did I do?” Then you will eventually get more rights than wrongs.

If You’re Afraid of Failure You Will Shrink 

Here’s the way that I see all that I just described, if you can’t relate to any of those that I just showed you. (Surely, though, you can think about the one with about love.) 

But I want you to picture, let’s say, that a person is unwilling to experience success or failure. They’re obsessed with only experiencing success. That’s what they utterly have to have. They can’t experience failure. 

Well, that person can’t have success.

If you’re willing to experience success or failure, you can have both. 

Let’s just picture that this right here is the person who has this willingness to have both success or failure. That person is going to have expanding space, size, dimension.

If that person has a failure that they can’t quite get rid of, then they’re going to shrink a little bit, so they’re unwilling to experience as much success or failure. 

They shrink and then they shrink some more. And then they shrink and they shrink and they shrink. 

That person who is so afraid of having a failure, so afraid of getting hurt, so afraid of getting a no, so afraid of being heartbroken, so afraid of everything, is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, because they’re not willing to experience life. 

That’s the person who has no other option than to sit there with a remote control and be just the effect of TV. And what’s his problem? 

The battery is dead in the remote. If you know where all your remote’s buttons are in the dark, you’ve got problems. 

You get out there and be willing to experience defeat, failure, and losses, because that’s the only way. 

How to Succeed

I’ve given you the greatest gift you could ever get as a Network Marketer  with this thing called the Pipeline, because it has all the steps you need to be successful in this business. 

In the military, when you’re skydiving or you’re going to diffuse a bomb, they give you an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). 

The men who came before us wrote up how to confront that bomb, how you confront diving, and even how you jump out of an airplane. 

They’ve already drilled that in and created a standard operating procedure. 

It’s the same with the Pipeline. 

This is all there is to getting any customer, any congregation in a church, any spouse that you want, a girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife. This is how you get votes if you’re in the political world. 

Whatever it is, you always have to generate a lead, contact, set an appointment, do a presentation, follow up, get the customer, serve them, and then make money. That’s the game. 

It’s the same with recruiting for reps or employees. You have to do the same thing. It’s always the same actions. 

Always Play The Game

Really, and truly, you want to be feared because you never, ever give up. I’m not talking about “just don’t quit.”

In network marketing, I see a lot of people on the stage who say, “The secret is just don’t quit. Just don’t quit.” 

Every single time, I think, “That’s bad advice,” because just staying on auto delivery or just showing up to the meetings is not enough.

You have to do the Pipeline. You have to be active. 

Let’s say in a football stadium, you have the people who are watching in the stands, and the people who are on the benches, and then you’ve got the people on the playing field who are at the line of scrimmage, always playing the game. 

That’s where you want to always be. 

You’re always there putting leads across the Pipeline and doing After Action Reports, writing out what worked and what didn’t. 

Then you can’t fail. 

You will be the one to fear, one of those who never gave up. 

P.S. If you don’t have a team, haven’t recruited anyone (or less than 10 people), this is THE course you should get – Network Marketing Training Course