I have never failed at anything.

Failure to me is fatal. When I think of failure, I think of something that truly has come to an end. That's all. It ended.

I tell people that I suffer temporary defeats every single day. As I said earlier I learned that from Zig Ziglar. If you don't know who Zig Ziglar is, I suggest you go online and buy all his books and audios. He changed my life.

When you look at some of the things that I have gone through, a lot of people would look at them as failures. The first time that I took the bar exam I missed it by one question. One question was the difference between passing and not passing. Not failing, but not passing. A lot of people say it's a pass/fail test and academia will tell you that you failed. If I truly had failed I would have given up and not gone back to take the bar exam and pass. Failure, again, is fatal. It's something that you've ultimately just given up on. When you start to change how you think about failure, to consider things not going as planned to be a temporary defeat, your mindset starts to change.

When I didn't pass the bar exam, friends expressed their concerns for me, saying, “Mike, I'm sorry that you didn't pass and it's really too bad. A lot of people don't pass the first time. It took JFK Jr. five times to pass the bar exam.” None of that made me feel any better. I didn't look at it as a failure. The biggest thing I learned from that experience is that I wasn't prepared.

In my book, Ask More, Get More, I talk about how you can mitigate and prevent failure to stop the negativity that comes along with it. I wasn't prepared the first time for the bar exam. I only studied for a few weeks, and it's the type of exam that you need to study for dozens of weeks. The second time I took it, I passed. The second time I felt as though I knew more about the law than I would ever know and I was prepared to go in. I also wasn't afraid to fail.

There are two options, right? There is success and then there's failure. Now there is no such thing as a failure gene or a success gene. For those of you who believe that people are born with something, that there's a genetic predisposition to success or entrepreneurship, you're wrong! Science has proven that's not the case. There's no such thing as a failure gene, and there's no such thing as a success gene. You can't use that as an excuse for why you're not doing well, why you're where you are in life, why you're not where you want to be, and things like this.

When we look at failure, we say to ourselves, “Well, I had this task that I was trying to achieve, but it didn't happen. I didn't get there. I didn't accomplish my goal.” Instead of failure, call it “temporary defeat”; using this tool, your mind is able to program itself and move forward much more easily. Often people are afraid to fail. You think, “I don't want to fail. I'm afraid to fail. I don't want to seem like a failure.” Because that's what you always hear when you're younger, “You don't want to be a failure in life.” You don't want to disappoint your parents, your teachers, or your family. Don't be a failure. Right?

You're programmed as a young child to be deathly afraid of failure. Now, there's nothing wrong with fear. I think fear is a good thing. It drives a lot of people. Where most people screw up is when they're afraid to fail to the point that they can't take action. You can fear failure. You can fear it, but don't be afraid to take the step that could possibly lead to a temporary defeat and not a failure. You see the difference there? You can fear it—in your head. You may be thinking, “I don't want to fail. I don't want to suffer a temporary defeat,” but it's okay. Don't be unwilling to take that step to move forward and possibly suffer a major temporary defeat. That is the key.

The most successful people in the world fail every single day. Some of them are the true definition of failure. They're done. It's a fatal mistake in whatever venture they were attempting, but they move on. The most successful people have programmed their minds to recognize that what most people call a failure is a temporary defeat, and they are able to move past it. I ran into an old friend, and I was talking about some of the things that we have going on here at Blue Vase Marketing. I talked about one of our business ventures that I'm so excited about called “draftdemons.com.” It's a daily fantasy sports website that's creating a lot of buzz in the daily fantasy sports world. It didn't work for us and we sold it. Is that a failure? No, we were defeated in the game we tried to play in, so we decided to play in another game.

When most people think of failure, they think of it in the traditional sense. They think of it truly as the end. When many people think of something as a failure, it becomes ingrained in their brain. It gets worse, and it continues growing like cancer until it has taken over your whole thought process and paralyzes you. I talk about Excusetosis in Ask More, Get More. It's one of the most prolific diseases that are out there. That's our minds making excuses for ourselves; failure happens the same way. If you look at failure as a fatal thing, as the end, as something that you just cannot overcome, and you have really disappointed everybody, and you consider yourself a failure, what does that do to your confidence? It destroys it. If you look at a brain scan, there is an actual chemical and physical reaction to every emotion and every thought that you have. These negative thoughts produce chemicals in your brain and body that are toxic, and they can continue to get worse.

When you look at people that society would deem failures, and do a brain scan or a body scan and test their blood, their systems would have chemicals and toxins that successful people don't have. When you scan people who are having positive emotions, their brains are filled with things like oxytocin and serotonin, chemicals and hormones that are released when you're happy. If you scan negative people who consider themselves failures, their brains are not smooth, meaning the actual gray matter our brain is made up of is rough and has jagged edges. They look all rocky, like the bottom of the ocean. It's a mess. Healthy, happy, successful people, their brains are smooth and rounded the way our brains are supposed to look.

If you consider yourself a failure, your brain actually manifests physical changes. When we talk about addiction, you hear people say, “Once an addict, always an addict.” They say this because addiction is in your brain, chemically and physiologically. Certain things happen when you do drugs. You alter the chemistry of your body. You can do the same exact damage to your brain and to your psyche, if you believe that you're a failure.

So many people live their lives like this, day in and day out.

GRADUATE LAW SCHOOL AND DON'T TAKE THE BAR EXAM? REALLY?

In the face of hard circumstances and challenges, most people are paralyzed by the fear of failure. Paralyzed. Imagine a person who has wanted to be a lawyer their whole life. They first go to undergraduate school. Four years. Okay? Then they go to law school. Four years, depending on how you did it. All that's great. Then to truly achieve their goal, they have to actually take the bar exam. Then they don't pass the bar exam, but at least they got that far. That's what happened to me the first time. But others go through all this schooling and are so paralyzed that they don't even decide to take the bar exam! I went to law school with people who decided not to take the bar exam, they were paralyzed by the fear of failure.

At the end of the day, who cares if you fail? The only person who really cares, and should care, is you. If you go take that test, or if you move forward with the initiative that you've been thinking about for years, and it doesn't work the first time, is that a failure? To some people, it is. Now you know better: it's just a temporary defeat.

Folks, this stuff works. I know it works, because I do it every single day. It's difficult to think about, but it's not difficult to do. We hear a lot about the power of positive thinking, which is very important. But it's not the be all and end all, okay? It is one step forward in the right direction. If you reprogram your mind, you tell yourself you're not afraid to suffer a temporary defeat. Wouldn't you rather have tried? Wouldn't you want to at least give it a shot?

Often entrepreneurs suffer a temporary defeat and call it a failure. They could have gone into that same scenario and been successful at it, but they didn't do something that's really key to success in general. They didn't prepare. Go back to my bar exam scenario. I was not prepared the first time around. I just wasn't. I'd also begun to reprogram my mind, to understand that it was not a failure. In my office I have the letter that I got from the board of bar overseers that begins, “We regret to inform…” I keep it to remind myself that if I had looked at that letter and called it a day, that would have been the ultimate failure and I would not be where I am today.

When you think about failure and success, the first thing you need to think about is yourself. It doesn't make you selfish. After all, what we're really talking about is you. We're talking about your brain, your thoughts, and your success.

The takeaway from this chapter is to no longer fail at anything. Again, I tell people that I've never failed at anything in my life. Doesn't it sound like such bullshit? It sounds so ridiculous, so overly confident and cocky. I suffer temporary defeats. Every single day I suffer temporary defeats, but I've never failed at anything. When you start to program your brain that way, things start to happen for you. You're able to work through the temporary defeats in a different way than you would have if you had considered them failures. You're able to see things just a little bit differently, and then people around you can see them that way too.

Like a disease, your attitude and the way you think about things does infect others. When you look at successful people, organizations, and families, you'll find they think just a little bit differently than most other people. That's really what it comes down to. Thinking just a little bit differently.

My second book, 5% More, was really an accomplishment not only for me personally, but for my whole organization. We not only felt good about the book, but we felt great about the possibility of achieving our goal of producing a New York Times best-selling book. We sold thousands of copies of the book and from what I know about book marketing, we sold more than enough to hit every book list. BUT we didn't. Now, I'm not going to lie to you and say I was elated and happy because we had a great book and missing the New York Times was no big deal. It was a very big deal and it hurt. However, 5% More has achieved some great things, and as I write we are continuing to change people's lives. Did it hurt? YES. But, just because we didn't hit that goal, it is certainly not a failure. Hard to see sometimes, but when you have trained your brain like I have to recognize the good things even in not so good moments, what you used to consider a failure is in fact another opportunity.