Seeds for the Positive are Found in the Negative
Sweet Bites for July 19, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
Any of the below bites resonate? Hit the reply button and let me know.
Choose Your Dessert for the Week
🍰 Mini Bite # 1
Reversing Failures
Napoleon Bonaparte often found himself in bad situations. Time and time again, he encountered scenarios where everything was against him. Yet he most often came out on top. In fact, he thrived when being out of his element and being pushed back on his heels.
Robert Greene summarized Napoleon’s philosophy as “anything negative, anything bad happening to you contains the seeds of a turnaround, you can turn it around into something positive.”
“Never see a situation as hopeless. Your own weakness can become strength with clever manipulation.”
When we fail, it is up to us to determine whether or not that failure is the end of the story or our time for a reversal. We can all follow Napoleon’s lead and find seeds of positivity in our failures, using those seeds for future successes.
Holding this reversal mindset is key. It’s saying yes I failed, but that doesn’t mean I won’t succeed.
📚 This Week’s Newsletter
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
💭 Thought for Reflection
“Our failure of courage ripples out beyond us, into the lives of other people.”
Ryan Holiday
Source: Courage is Calling
🍰 Mini Bite # 2
Find Patience for Success
Jesse Itzler is a serial-entrepreneur and writer. One of his business ventures was creating an energy supplement company to compete with 5 Hour Energy drinks. But instead of bottles, the product was going to be a jolt of caffeine in the form of a strip that the user placed on the tongue, similar to Listerine strips.
So Itzler hired the best celebrities to help promote the product and at launch, the sales skyrocketed. For the first three weeks, sales just kept climbing.
And then in week four, everything plummeted.
“At the end of the day, the product wasn’t great. You can have the ideas, you can have the best celebrities, but at the end of the day, your product has to be great.”
This failure didn’t deter Itzler who to this day continues his entrepreneurial pursuits and uses the lessons of his failures to lead him to successes.
Itzler says that most people fail today because they just don’t have the patience for successes to come, instead wanting quick gratification.
“It takes years to build a brand. It takes years to get a customer base. It takes years to perfect your pitch and your craft and what works and what doesn’t work. It takes time.”
Failures happens along the way, and being afraid of failure cuts us from any growth potential we could have gained by scaring us into inaction.
The key is to try. Try new things, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and keep trying.
🦉 Wisdom
“Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment.”
Jeff Bezos
Source: The Four (by Scott Galloway)
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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