Do you think you’re smarter than a baby? A newborn…you probably are. But what about a 1 year old? Maybe not so much.

At around one, babies have usually mastered the art of crawling and they begin to pull themselves up to stand on their tiny little feet. They wobble and sway because their little legs don’t have much strength and they haven’t gained full control of their motor skills.

So they grab onto things, pull themselves up, stand for a split second, then they fall on their butts. They do this over and over. Pull themselves up, stand, fall, pull themselves up, stand, and fall.

They keep doing it, unphased by the fact that they weren’t very good at standing the first 100 times. Eventually, they pull themselves up and all of a sudden, they’re standing long enough to take a step, but JUST long enough to take a step.

They fall right back on their butts, never losing focus on whatever they were attempting to walk to in the first place, so they...

I want to revisit a story I told a while back on my podcast, Master Your Mission. It’s about James Dyson, the founder and CEO of Dyson the vacuum cleaner company. 

Dyson failed, repeatedly, to build the vacuum cleaner that he dreamed of building and putting on the market—his signature G-Force vacuum cleaner. In fact, he failed 5,126 times. 

It was on the 5,127th time that he succeeded at building it. Even after he successfully created his prototype, he was rejected by every manufacturer and distributor in the UK, because they didn’t like his bagless design. 

It took him 15 years and almost his entire savings to develop his innovative vacuum cleaner, which is the best selling vacuum cleaner in the US— eventually making him a billionaire. Dyson said that each of the 5,126 failures taught him something new that led to his eventual success.

Now, James Dyson was way more committed to his dream than most of us will ever be. I’d argue...

As you pursue your dreams, you should be writing big goals, breaking those big goals down into smaller goals, and tracking them all. If you’re experiencing failure quite often, it’s important to look at the goals you are setting and be sure that the actual act of setting goals is not where you’re failing.

As I’ve discussed on my podcast—Master Your Mission—in the past, you should set goals using the SMART method of goal setting. Your goals should be:

Specific—Choose a specific thing you’d like to achieve.

Measurable—You must be able to measure your progress toward accomplishing it.

Attainable—Your goal should be practical. It should be something that pushes you but is within your real...

Most of us have failed at something. Actually, most of us have probably failed at many things. From a young age, we’re taught to try as hard as we can to obtain our goals. We grow up playing sports, competing in science fairs, and learning things like how to ride a bike. Failing at those things was, generally, inconsequential. 

As adults, we set out to accomplish goals like graduating from college, starting a business, or raising a family. Failing at achieving these goals could prove to be much more consequential. As a result, failing can be a devastating experience that causes us to develop all types of negative emotions, leading to fear and anxiety of ever experiencing that devastation again.

But we have the wrong idea about failure. We should look at it in a much more positive light, and we should be proud of each time we’ve tried and failed because the alternative is not trying at all.

To help you restructure the way you think of failure, let’s...