Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 719 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom

Success Through Failure – Mindshift Monday

Thank you for joining us for our 5 days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. This is Day 719 of our trek, and it is time for our Mindshift Monday series. Wisdom-Trek’s primary focus is to assist you in creating your living legacy. Creating your living legacy can only be accomplished by gaining wisdom in many areas of life. You can only gain wisdom by changing what you allow to go into your mind, which is a result of changing the way you think.

In other words, to create your living legacy, you must choose to be in a continual mode of mindshift. It is easy to get stuck in a mindset that your current circumstances cannot be changed. That is not true, but you must understand this fundamental principle: In order to change your life, you must change how you think and what you think about. Our Mindshift Monday podcast and journal will provide you with practical ways to make a mindshift to a rich and satisfying life. 

We are broadcasting from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. When this episode originally airs, I should be back from Arizona working with our partners on our townhome project. Everything is in place now, and we have begun Phase II. We have a tight deadline for this phase, so it is important that we streamline our processes to be successful.

We learned many lessons during Phase I. Lessons learned is a nice way of saying we had many failures. Cost overruns, labor overruns, and time overruns caused the potential profits from Phase I to evaporate. This forces us to have a mindshift in our approach, and as with most important lessons learned, we know that Phase II will be…

Success Through Failure

For most of us during this trek of life, we have had a variety of experiences that we would consider failures. The frustration, hurt, expended energy, disappointments, and loss of resources is a feeling that applies to most of us. Perhaps it’s the feeling of failure that causes many to begin to fear failure. Maybe that fear stems from the fact that we have a misconception that failure is final. Even with significant failure, if it did not result in loss of life, those failures can be used to build future success through these principles.

1. A failure is not a failure if it prods you to keep on trying.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it. In fact, we are often on that line and don’t realize it. Many a person has thrown up their hands and quit when with a little more effort and patience they would have succeeded. Just as the tide goes clear out, so it comes back clear in. There is no failure except from within yourself. This is no insurmountable barrier until you give up on your pursuit.

Booker T. Washington said, “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.” Each person has a choice to live in one of two worlds: the crowded world of the defeated with those who quit or the roomy world of the successful with those who persist.

God does not desire for us to be defeated, but will allow hardships to grow us and mature us to handle the success. In most situations, it boils down to the laws of planning and harvesting as we are told in 2 Corinthians 9:6, "Remember this—a farmer who plants only a few seeds will get a small crop. But the one who plants generously will get a generous crop."

2. A failure is not a failure if we learn a lesson from that experience and use it for good.

H. Lawrence said, “If only we could have two lives, the first in which we make the mistakes,