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Everything Is A GOLDEN Opportunity If You Know How To Tweak It

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I’ve personally had many failures, from when I was very little to when I grew up. I kept looking for opportunities. I don’t know what I expected: a dove to come down from heaven with a letter in its beak that wrote “Here’s an opportunity” or something that was metaphorically ‘gift-wrapped.’

I didn’t get any of those. Instead, I got one big full sack of failures, like I had my own personal Santa Claus delivering them to me every day.

So how did I turn that around?

The best way to get over failure is to overlook it because you are so busy working on something you are very passionate about. You can deal with failures infinitely that way. And something magical happens when you do that: your failures turn into SUCCESSES.

It’s true, or at least it worked for me. Here are some examples.

1.I was once working as a security guard. Nothing major. Our sole responsibility turned out to be ‘protecting’ the fridges at night in this big hotel. I didn’t get to play the big hero or save a beautiful woman. Here’s how it went.

All the other security guards lived hand to mouth. I worked as a receptionist for the hotel during the day as well, so I had plenty of money. That didn’t mean that I didn’t work very hard, though. Our hotel was bonkers in the morning and afternoon, and at night, well, you had to be awake, so that was hard enough on its own. I sometimes went days without sleep.

That wasn’t the interesting part. Our security manager ran security over a network of many hotels and did it all ‘cash in hand’ so to speak. I’m not here to debate the ethics of it all. Basically, he didn’t pay us. He was supposed to be paying us cash in hand — and he had been doing this for years — but just didn’t pay us for sometimes between 1 and 2 months when our wages were promised weekly. The other security guards would complain, then whine, then quit.

Or, they threatened him. I don’t know. Either way, they didn’t get their money, and our manager knew how to handle them.

So I did something different — by accident. I was simply overworked from all the hours I was putting in during the day and night. I was slightly depressed he didn’t pay us; I was basically working nights for free. So the manager would come down to ask me whether I would work certain nights, and I would say “Yes,” and that would be it. He always did double-takes as he was walking away. There was always me yawning at the other end. I didn’t ask him about money.

The magic happened when he did decide to pay us, or me. Other employees had quit, and here was I, quiet as a church mouse. He rounded up my wages to the nearest hundred bucks (different currency, but the quantities were similar). Eventually, he began paying me more frequently. Maybe I was just doing a great job standing around at night because that’s all I was doing. That, or he grew weary of my quietness. Either way, I made a few extra hundred bucks in time.

2. As a budding ‘entrepreneur,’ I once tried my hand at the first thing I found on the Internet: SFM. It was a network marketing thing I’m not a huge fan of, but I’m not here to recommend or to complain about them.

I lost $1000+ on my first night. How? It wasn’t their fault. In truth, they had a simple formula: place video ads that they already made on YouTube videos or anywhere else using AdSense. We would then be paid when people bought. Also, don’t go crazy. I went crazy.

I had a couple of hundred bucks in my AdSense account, and all my video ads were costing me like 0.03 dollars in a matter of hours. I removed the limiters I had placed (stopping the costs from running up above a certain price) and ran the ads on a few more videos on top of that. When I woke up the next day, I owed Google $1000+. I felt as if I was hit by a ton of bricks. I had worked hard for that money.

I remember lying on my bed, suffocating from the sheer loss and anxiety. I felt terrible. I moped around for an appropriate amount of time, had a shower sitting down, and everything. I then came back to look at how monumentally I had messed it up when I noticed something. Every ad cost me about $1, even left to run overnight, except one. One ran up $1000+.

There was something different about the video I put it on. It was a MOTIVATIONAL video. For those of you who don’t know, SFM is a ‘take control of your life, also financial freedom!’ type of business. So whereas the video cost me a ton because it had more views than any other, it also generated leads.

Even later on, if I tried running SFM ads on non-MOTIVATIONAL videos, nobody cared. So I had inadvertently found a niche that at the time (ages ago), was relatively untapped. I eventually made all my money back by advertising just to motivational videos, and then some.

3. I was a house alarm salesman. Yes, I had a lot of jobs. This one was kind of cute. I knocked on a door and a lady very seriously and, with enthusiasm, said she didn’t want to hear anything. She looked like she had had an awful day. I said, “OK, ma’am. Have a nice day,” and left it at that. Normally, we were taught the “pitch ’til you die!” approach. Anyway, she asked me if I wanted to come in for tea.

I found that weird since she practically opened the door with her own pitch on why she didn’t want to hear anything. She did look like she had an awful day but told me about the neighbors’ house alarms (I didn’t take the tea). She had been a saleswoman herself. She enumerated for me all the features of this uncommon alarm that was popular in this neighborhood and what the problems with it were. I used what she said when talking to the rest of the neighbors. I closed above average. Even people who are initially rude can be helpful.

All of these events had something in common: I was purposefully and mostly enthusiastically working towards greater goals at the time and didn’t let the failures throw me off because I enjoyed what I was doing and wanted to do the work. The failures, and many others like these, eventually turned themselves around like a tide for the better. It can always be a coincidence, so in the worst-case scenario, focusing on your work and not giving in to negative emotion in the face of failure simply makes you feel better and forget.

Have a nice day.

This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.

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