Many of us yearn for life to be smooth and easy someday. We imagine a place where everything is in order and nothing unexpected happens, life just pleasantly passes like a gentle Summer breeze. Our present reality may seem radically different, however. Interestingly, many of the most successful people throughout history have somewhat shifted their perspective on this idea of a "smooth life." A funny old man named Colonel Sanders tried to sell his fried chicken to over 1000 restaurants before one agreed to try it now KFC has over 5000 restaurants in the U.S. alone. People like this have adopted a belief that life is lumpy, not smooth and even. This is simply the nature of being human, of being truly alive. When we expect life to be problem-free, we are often disappointed. However, if we expect that every week there will be unanticipated problems and furthermore, we know that weve made it through countless weeks like this before, then it doesnt seem so bad. The other next part of this is to treat failures as lessons.

For example, if you are trying to sell a product or service, each time a potential customer fails to purchase, ask yourself Why didnt they buy? And keep track of it (this step is essential). After a short while, you can look over your list of reasons and draw conclusions like Cold calls dont work 85% of the time or Nearly all sales attempts of our products to non-profit organizations are failures. Then you could modify your sales efforts to either eliminate ineffective efforts, or to even dig deeper and find out why these sales efforts dont work for you. It is always such a pleasure for me to help a client through a process where they examine what doesnt work in their business (or personal life), and then reduce or eliminate the time spent there. The rewards are countless as they have more time, feel more motivated and inspired (because they have far more successes than before), and most importantly, they get to spend more time on the things that really do work for them.

So, in summary:

Know that life is lumpy, and expect each week to have its share of lumps.

Each time you try something and it doesnt work as hoped, ask Why didnt this work? and write down the reason (if youre not sure, ask a friend or co-worker for their opinion)

Look over your list of reasons why things didnt work out and try to see common threads.

Revise your approach to reduce or eliminate effort at methods or techniques that dont yield good results

Optionally, examine the things that dont work well and try to figure out why they didnt work, then revise your approach accordingly and try again

A final part of this, which many of you already do, is to keep track of your successes as well as failures. If a particular method works really well, then be sure to use it again and again. Heres to your success!