The One Time Choice

Carlos Castaneda said that we choose only once to be warriors or to be ordinary.  The difference between the warriors and ordinary men is that where ordinary people see only blessings and curses, successes and failures, wins and losses, the warriors see only challenges; everything is perceived as either a challenge that has been overcome, or it is a challenge yet to be overcome.

This is a choice we only make once time because it is a choice that affects your fundamental approach to everything else in life.  Because ordinary people only see things as wins and losses as opposed to simply challenges that have or have not yet been overcome, they often are not willing to persist through adversity as long as those with the warrior mindset are.  We have been deceived to think that success and failure are opposite of each other.  The dictionary even defines failure as the lack of success.

Failure and success are not opposites.  They are, in fact, very closely related.  What ordinary people call failure is merely a checkpoint on the way to success.  It is almost a necessity that you go through these checkpoints before succeeding, because nothing great ever happens on the first try.  If you are succeeding at hitting your goals on the first try, you are not setting your goals high enough.  I'm reminded of Thomas Edison, who tried ten thousand times before successfully creating the incandescent light bulb.  When asked about all these "failed" attempts, he simply said "I didn't fail 10,000 times, I just learned 9,999 ways how not to make a light bulb".

But, is this really a choice between the ordinary mindset and the warrior mindset?  I have been blessed with the privilege of watching 2 beautiful nieces grow up before my eyes, but what I consider just as much of a privilege is what I have learned from observing them as they grow, as they first learn to roll from their back to their belly and back, as they first learn to creep and crawl and become mobile, and then when they get up on their feet and start to walk.  This whole process is full of frustration for the child. 

The first time they try to walk, they make it only a step or two before falling back to the ground, but does the child give up on the whole walking thing and crawl around on his or her belly for the rest of their life just because it didn't work out the first, second, or third time?  Obviously the answer is no, so my question is why do we give up on your goals and dreams just because they don't work out for us on the first few tries.

I dare someone to fail at something 10, 100, or 1,000 times before giving up.  Going back to the first rule of salesmanship, that when value exceeds price, people make a transaction.  Are your goals more valuable than the cost of possibly failing 10, 100, or 1,000 times?