A big warm welcome to the Get Life Right Audio Series. And congratulations on starting this 5-day challenge learning how to build more emotional and mental fitness and to live life on your own terms.

Let me tell you the story that inspired me to create the Get Life Right Audio Series, and which had a profound impact on me.

It’s a story about the Apple co-founder and innovative genius Steve Jobs.

According to the story, Steve Job was known for always getting things right, to most competitors’ frustration.

Now, one can’t be blamed for possibly subscribing to this idea that Steve always got things right looking at the amazing innovations and the massive legacy that he left behind.

What the story was trying to convey wasn’t that Steve was always right … But rather that he used to get things right.

Steve was a proud and confident individual, almost to a fault. At the same time he was willing to be wrong.

You simply had to prove to him that you were right. And if you did, he would honour that and would open up to learn from the experience.

This is actually how he got to create the wondrous things that he was part of. Steve’s pursuit of and willingness to get things right – not being right!

Making mistakes and being wrong are stepping stones to getting things right, eventually.

I took away from that story that few things in life are about being right … But rather about getting them right. It’s less about the destination and more about the journey.

50% of what we know today is probably wrong, judging from past experience. The only problem is, we just don’t know which 50% we’re wrong about!

Life, or really anything can’t be about being right. It can only be about getting it right.

Being right is dangerous. Being right changes nothing. Being wrong invites change. Being right means more of the same, and nothing new can come from that. 

Whatever you do in life or otherwise, you want to dedicate your time to getting things right instead of wasting time trying to be right.

You want to fail, and you want to learn from those failures.

In fact, there are no failures. That’s just a label.

The only time you fail is when you fail to learn from your failure.

It’s not failure, it’s only feedback.

One of the essential life skills is to “fail forward”, to have the courage to try things in the pursuit of getting things right. This builds resilience, another key life skill for handling change.

What I want for you is to start evolving this life-changing skill of seeing failure as feedback, and cultivating an attitude of failing forward wanting to get things right.

This helps you develop the emotional as well as the mental fitness and change management to face hardship and challenges.

Your assignment on your first day of this challenge is to answer and reflect on the questions below to help evolve this skill for yourself.

What is a failure of yours that turned out to be a blessing in disguise? Something that you later learnt from and made you stronger?

What would you do in life, how would you be different as a person if you knew that you couldn’t fail at whatever you did?

What would be possible for you if you saw failure as stepping stones to success – learning opportunities?

What else could you call the experience of failure if you couldn’t use the label “failure” and had to reframe it as something more positive?

Well done on finishing the first lesson of the audio series! You are on track to getting what you want … and to handle it better when you don’t. I’ll be seeing you in the next lesson.