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How to pick yourself up after a loss
How to pick yourself up after a loss.
I know what it’s like to get knocked down. I certainly know what it’s like to make big decisions when you’re reeling from a major loss – it’s a bad move that leads to bad repercussions. Looking back over the past 15 years of my life, I can see a long list of failed businesses, bands, blogs and ideas.
I’ve spent so long trying at things, failing, and picking myself up again, that I once became almost immune to the emotional blow. And that’s a bad thing. When you take a loss, there are only two positive aspects.
The worst thing you can do, after you’ve tried and failed, is go charging right ahead into a new challenge, before you’ve had time to let the last one sink in. This is pretty common knowledge – we all know someone who married their rebound partner after a break up, instead of stepping back and reflecting on their relationship and why it failed.
Unfortunately, even though we’ve all seen this happen, we don’t take it and apply it to other situations, other shit that we go through. When you start a business, and it blows, you suddenly pivot, or start again, or reset.
When you’ve been working on a blog and nobody reads it, you try and find an instant fix so you can start another blog and go through the whole process all over again.
None of that works. None of that is healthy. None of that is the right way to pick yourself up after a major loss.
So what do you do? What’s the right answer? What’s the next step?
You take the time to reflect.
You have to be able to put a certain amount of distance between you and your failure so that you can find a sense of balance and try to understand it. Understand what you did wrong, what you did right, and what was totally out of your control. Understand where everything went off the rails.
Learning from what we’ve done, from the mistakes that have been made, that’s the only way to achieve anything great. Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple and spent years in the wilderness slaving over his doomed NEXT computer long before he made the iPhone happen.
He spent those years reflecting on the reasons for his failure and examining it.
You can find similar examples and experiences in the lives of any great creative, entrepreneur or thinker. They’ve all had losses, they’ve all stepped away and examined them, and none of them had a hit with a rebound project.
The same is going to apply for you, every time and in every case. That’s just the way it works. If you fail, and your method of picking yourself up is to just dive back in without asking what happened the first time, history and your own mistakes will be repeated over and over.
Trust me, I’ve been there, done that and learned from the experience. Heed this advice and you will be back to your glorious self in no time!
