Still Standing: One Man’s Story of Transforming Failure into Success (And how you can do it, too)
Anthony Casale
No matter where in life you happen to be, Still Standing: One Man’s Story of Transforming Failure into Success (And how you can do it, too) will leave you inspired!
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Excerpt From Still Standing
Always remember that much smarter people than you have failed. People with many more resources. People surrounded by accountants and lawyers and advisors. Nobody is immune, no matter who they are or what kind of assets or capabilities they might have. In fact, sometimes the biggest instances of failure are from the people who seem to have the most on the ball. With strong resources and, perhaps, early successes, you can become complacent. Arrogance can blind you to warning signs you might otherwise see. For me, experiencing my monumental collapse has cleansed me of arrogance once and for all. At least I like to think so. No more will I be a victim of smug naiveté. All of that has been replaced by a healthy level of fear. This is not to say that I’ll never fail at anything again. In fact, I fail a lot of times. Deals go south. It happens. But now I’m more careful, I do my homework, I have exit strategies in place.
Though everybody fails, the dedicated ones, the ones who view the race as a marathon and not a sprint, pick themselves up and go right back at it again. They know that all you can really do is be vigilant, be on guard for failure. Then understand the things you need to do to recover from it when it slams you to the mat.
Let’s start with understanding this: failure is necessary. Failure does not negate success, failure complements it. Failure helps get you to success.
Failure means you’re experienced, hardened. When you come out of it, you’ll be the better for it. You’ll have battle scars you can be proud of. If it was up to me, anyone who has a serious setback in life and survives it and learns from it, ought to be able to put some kind of letters behind their name. DoF, maybe – “Doctor of Failure”. It’s better than any kind of educational degree I can think of. Successful people I know would be honored to display the letters. They’d be proud of the failure, proud of what it made them into by having to overcome it. You sit down with any really successful person, no matter in what walk of life, and ask about their career and chances are good that he or she will tell you more about the failures they’ve overcome than the achievements they’ve made. The stories are more interesting, and the outcomes more significant. The valuable lessons are always in the failures, not the achievements.
The real key is, what do you do when you find yourself failing at something? How are you going to respond? It is at these moments when you often begin to really learn about yourself. Do you have what it takes to fight back? Do you pull yourself together and come out swinging, or do you wilt into a corner somewhere? Do you make excuses or blame others or feel sorry for yourself? To overcome whatever dire circumstances you might find yourself in, you’re going to have to do a lot of soul-searching. And if you’re honest with yourself, you’re going to end up learning a lot about just who you really are.
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