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, and the second in which we profit from the lessons learned.” A young writer was told, “Every one of your rejected manuscripts were rejected for a reason.” Have you checked each failure you have had and found out why? You must put your failure to work for you. The greatest mistake we can make is not learning from and correcting what caused us to fail.

3. A failure is not a failure if through it we discover our own true selves.

Reading the biographies of many great men and women, it is evident that most successful people started out in life as failures and because of those failures found their life’s work.

As an example, when Nathaniel Hawthorne lost his position in the Custom House at Salem Massachusetts, he came home utterly defeated and told his wife that he was a complete failure. To his amazement, she greeted his dismal news with delight and joy, saying “Great, now you can write that book you wanted to.” So he sat down and wrote The Scarlet Letter, which is still considered by many critics as the greatest novel ever written in the United States. If because of failure a person finally discovers where and how their talents can be used for God, the failure will turn into a success.

4. A failure is not a failure if through it we become better-disciplined individuals.

The Bible has much to say about disciplined living. The Apostle Paul teaches us in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, “Don’t you realize that in a race everyone runs, but only one person gets the prize? So run to win! All athletes are disciplined in their training. They do it to win a prize that will fade away, but we do it for an eternal prize. So I run with purpose in every step. I am not just shadowboxing. I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified.”

All great men and women have had failure, struggle, and discipline woven into their lives. If the experiences we encounter on our trek of life, regardless of how bitter and unfortunate, soften our hearts, humble our spirits, purify our motives, clean our souls, and make us more sensitive to proper values and more sympathetic towards the unfortunate, then we will have succeeded. If we allow our failures to be an instrument to discipline our inner spirits, they will be successes.

Next week we will continue our trek of Mindshift Monday. On tomorrow’s trek, we will explore another wisdom quote. This 3-minute wisdom supplement will assist you in becoming healthy, wealthy, and wise each day. Thank you for joining me on this trek called life. Encourage your friends and family to join us and then come along tomorrow for another day of our Wisdom-Trek, Creating a Legacy.

If you would like to listen to any of the past daily treks or read the associated journals, they are all available at Wisdom-Trek.com. You can also subscribe through iTunes or Google Play so that each day’s trek will be downloaded automatically.

Thank you for allowing me to be your guide, mentor, and most of all your friend as I serve you through the Wisdom-Trek podcast and journal.

As we take this trek of life together, let us always:

1. Live Abundantly (Fully)
2. Love Unconditionally
3. Listen Intentionally
4. Learn Continuously
5. Lend to others Generously
6. Lead with Integrity
7. Leave a Living Legacy Each Day

This is Guthrie Chamberlain reminding you to Keep Moving Forward, Enjoy Your Journey, and Create a Great Day Every Day! See you tomorrow!