Articles From all Over

The Secret of Surthrival- By Chellie Campbell

(Surthrival = Survive and Thrive).

“If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.”—Mary Pickford

If you aren’t winning enough in your life, it’s because you aren’t losing enough.

“What?!” you may be thinking. “I’m losing plenty, thanks. That can’t be right.”

It is right. You have to take risks to win. And you don’t win every time you take a risk. Success is a percentage game—and it’s not even a big percentage. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to fail more often than unsuccessful people. They are willing to hear “no” and get rejected. Millionaire baseball players bat .300—that means they only hit three balls out of ten. But they make millions because most people can’t even hit that many.

The difference is that winners have an intense, laser-focused attention on the goal—and on winning the goal. They don’t see the goal as out of reach, they believe that they will attain it if they just do the right things. If they don’t know exactly what the right things are, they are willing to experiment, pay for lessons, workshops, coaches, and try different things until they happen upon the things that work, and then they do those things over and over and over, ad infinitum, until the goal is achieved. They send out a ship, and then they send out another one. And another one. And another and another and another. It doesn’t matter how many ships sink, how many people say no to you; it only matters how many people say yes. So keep on going until enough people say yes. You have to have this kind of determination not to quit and to keep going until the yeses arrive like the next ship on the next wave. Or the one after that.

It’s fun to see the goal and see yourself reaching it. That vision is what keeps you going when your ships encounter stormy seas. Sailors learn to sail when they’re out on the ocean, not when they’re home safe at the dock. What good is the finest navigation equipment, the latest in ship-to-shore radios, new white canvas sails, and scrumptious food stored in the galley, if you don’t brave the waves?

Yes, it’s hard—so what? It’s hard for everyone. You can still move yourself forward every day—no matter how hard it gets. Or you can spend your life commiserating with the other Tuna over how the economy is so bad and life is too hard.

After my first book was published, I received a letter from a friend congratulating me. She said that she had always had a secret desire to be a writer, and had even written a magazine article once. Eagerly, she sent it to the editor of a magazine, and waited anxiously for her ship to come in. But this one floundered on the rocks. The only driftwood from the wreckage was a rejection slip. She never tried again.

That’s the saddest thing to me—that you are talented, glorious, special, and the world needs you, but you don’t trust it. You have had one shipwreck and you are afraid to brave the storms at sea again. One idiot out there—who isn’t even Your People—says something mean and you give up your greatness in subservience to their opinion? Stop that! Don’t give up the ship! Try again. Build another ship, build another fleet if you have to. The only failure is failing to begin again. Your People are out there waiting for you, praying for you to show up. The world needs you or you wouldn’t be here. The only thing stopping you is you. And that you can change.

So how do you remain undefeated in the face of lost ships? How do you garner the strength—mental, physical, and spiritual—to build another? And the one after that? How do you face mounting losses, over and over again?

1. You have a vision
2. You are determined* to get it
3. You do what it takes to get it
4. You don’t give up until you get it

* Determination is the magic fairy dust that enables you to do #3 and #4.

People are wrong all the time. The soap opera Santa Barbara deemed Julia Roberts “dull.” Sharon Stone was rejected by General Hospital and As the World Turns nixed Hugh Grant. Mike Medavoy, one of Hollywood’s super agents, told a young Steven Spielberg his career was “doomed” and passed him off to another agent. Cary Grant and Jeanette MacDonald did a screen test for Fox, but were turned down with this explanation, “We feel neither of these people has a screen personality.”

After Sony’s Columbia Records label cancelled her, Alicia Keys sold 5.5 million copies of her next album for their competitor and won five Grammys. Ashanti was fired by Epic Records and came back to sell 3.3 million copies of her debut album for a rival. Alanis Morrisette was turned down by record company after record company, until Maverick took her on and her debut album Jagged Little Pill sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Bonnie Raitt shot to the top of the charts with two back-to-back albums on Capitol Records that spawned hit singles and won three Grammys apiece—right after her prior record company fired her.

Losing fires up winners. Their response when someone tells them they aren’t good enough, they can’t do it, or they’re a loser, is “Oh, yeah? Watch this!” They use the rejection as an energetic launching pad to redouble their efforts, sharpen their creativity, and prove the naysayers wrong.

So how many times have you tried to achieve your goal? Who among the people you know have tried something 9,999 times without getting results and still kept on trying? What does it take to keep on keeping on? How strong is your vision? How strong is your belief in yourself?

It is, in the end, a self-esteem issue. You have to believe in yourself when no one else does. You have to believe in yourself, or no one else is going to. It helps to bolster your belief when you have a lot of Dolphins swimming in your pod. Dolphins who will sing to you, “You can do it! You can do anything you put your mind to! We love you! We believe in you!” But then it’s up to you to believe what they are telling you. If your pod thinks you are fabulous, you are. If your pod thinks you should go for it, you should. If your pod is full of naysayers—look for a new pod.

And if you have no one else, you have me. I am telling you, you can do it! You wouldn’t have gotten this far in reading this article if that weren’t true. Not everyone will even open up this email—but you did, so this message is for you. Are you ready to believe? There is always another chance for you, just as often as there is another day.

--Excerpt from Zero to Zillionaire by Chellie Campbell (Sourcebooks, 2006)

Chellie Campbell is the creator of the Financial Stress Reduction® Workshops, and author of The Wealthy Spirit (Sourcebooks, 2002) and Zero to Zillionaire (Sourcebooks, 2006). She has been prominently quoted as a financial expert in the Los Angeles Times, Good Housekeeping, Lifetime, Essence, Woman’s World and more than 45 popular books. She can be reached at Chellie@chellie.com