Talk about anything significant – you have a set of rules. Some are
global and some are specific to a particular situation. One rule that
has been time tested in life is that “sometimes you win and sometimes you lose”

However smart you are there are times when you will goof up or fail. How
fast you recover from a goof up or failure will be a key factor in
determining whether you are part of the statistics or you will be a
stand out. One of my friends used to say “either you succeed or
you LEARN”. Actually, failure is not the problem in most cases. What
you do about the failure is. How quickly do you recover from a failure
and start marching again. In other words, it’s not the falling down but getting up quickly everytime you fall down
that’s important. History is filled with lessons (Abraham Lincoln,
Colonel Sanders etc.) where peole did not accept failure and ultimately
succeeded.

They say that nobody can stop an idea whose time has come. However,
just having an idea rarely makes anyone successful. One needs to
execute on it. Execution is where the rubber meets the road.
Ask any successful person on their journey to success and you will see
that the path was never a straight line. There is no shortcut to
success. One of my all time favorite books The Innovation Paradox  deals
with this concept in great detail.

What I am saying will be very obvious if you look back at your own life
and think through most of the failures. Imagine yourself and think
about the feelings you had right at the moment when the failure
occured. What are your feelings now about the same failure. Very
different, indeed! What looked like a huge failure a few years or
months ago will seem insignificant after some time.  If this is
true, one way to trick your mind is to fast forward your life a bit
whenever a failure occurs and observe what you would think about this
failure when you look back (a few years from now) This is a way of
reframing to help you to get back on the feet.

In summary, I want to say that failures happen and you will fail or fall down
at times. If you want to distinguish yourself, learn to get back on
your feet fast every time you fall down.