“Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success” by John C. Maxwell. Join me and my fellow book club members as we discuss our key takeaways from Failing Forward. It was great to get back to topics near to our heart, Work-Life balance.
Initially, this book captured my attention because bringing meaning to failure is a grand idea when we’ve all been subject to the five grading systems perpetuated by our schools. However, as we continued reading, we realized this book is repetitive, and you might be better off reading this summary.
Maxwell prefaces Failing Forward by saying he wants everyone he meets to become a REAL success. REAL is an acronym for Relationships, Equipping, Attitude, and Leadership. This book is written to help develop the “A” – attitude. Maxwell believes that the difference between average and successful people is their response and perception of failure. This is exciting because it means that you have the control to change the trajectory of your life. Often, we jump from “I made a mistake” to “I am a mistake,” and this emotional response turns our mistake into an actual failure. Maxwell urges the reader to prepare for failure because it is far more common than the alternative, that it’s not a matter of if you’ll fail, but when you do: how will you react?
By the end of Failing Forward, Maxwell has covered his 15 steps to failings forward. They go as follows:
- Realize there’s one major difference between average people and achieving people.
- Learn a new definition of failure
- Remove the ‘you’ from failure
- Take action and reduce your fear
- Change your response to failure by accepting responsibility
- Don’t let the failure from outside get inside you
- Say goodbye to yesterday
- Change yourself, and your world changes
- Get over yourself and start giving yourself
- Find the benefit in every bad experience
- If at first, you do succeed, try something harder
- Learn from a bad experience and make it a good experience
- Work on the weakness that weakens you
- Understand there’s not much difference between failure and success
- Get up, get over it, get going
If you’re interested in buying Failing Forward, you can find it on Amazon here.
Learn more about the author here.
Join our business book club here.
Check out last month’s book club here.
