Unless you are one of those persons who has never tried to achieve anything of great significance, there will come a time in your life when you will experience a failure, a major setback or even an embarrassing defeat. The key to success in life, however, is not allowing the failure to overwhelm and depress you and thus prevent you from trying great things again.

Anyone can lead a dull, take-no-risks, mediocre life. It is the dreamers, the chance-takers and the motivationally driven who change the world. If you fall into this category, here are a few tips on how to overcome a failure and advance to even greater heights.

#1 – Treat each failure or set-back as a learning experience. After a failure, take a brief break and allow your mind to clear. Then review what happened as objectively and honestly as possible. Determine the top five mistakes, oversights, incorrect assumptions and persons which led to the failure. Always start the analysis with yourself. What did you do wrong or failed to realize in advance? Accurate self-analysis can be your greatest tool for future advancement. You must understand that when properly analyzed, failure brings wisdom and makes you much better armed for achieving future endeavors.

#2 – Bounce-back immediately with a new or revised project. The purpose of the analysis cited above is to provide you with the tools and insight you will need to succeed the next time. And the “next time” should come soon after the initial failure. Even in failure, you may have been closer to success than you realized. The great inventor Thomas Alva Edison said it best: “Don’t give up. Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” You must understand, however, that “immediate” is a relative term. Your analysis may show that you need to bring new tools, people and financing into your next project. Do not start the new project until those things are added. But immediately begin searching for those new “guarantors” of success.

#3 – Stay highly motivated! Success in life does not go most frequently to the neediest, the most deserving, the most beautiful or even the most intelligent. Instead, success tends to favor the most highly motivated or that person who is most driven to succeed. Remember that emotion is the “life force.” Logic and rationality can help us determine what to do and how best to do it; but it is only emotional drive which forces us to do it. You must understand that there are plenty of intelligent people in life who have achieved very little. And while intelligence is a tremendously great asset, the superior person is always the one with a strong, internal, emotional drive to succeed.

#4 – Maintain confidence in yourself. You are the one! You are within that top five percent of the population with the intelligence, drive and smart work habits which enables you to control yourself, lead others and better the world. You must believe this! If you ever begin to doubt yourself, you are loss. You must understand, however, that maintaining high levels of self-confidence does not mean you are to walk around pretending you know everything and rejecting sage advice from others. In fact, having self-confidence means you are personally secure about yourself and you have no difficulty asking others for help, advice or partnership. Having self-confidence does mean that you walk around with the belief that “I am the one who can make this idea or project work!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert N. Taylor is a researcher, motivational expert and editor of the National Black News Journal. For more information about this article and other Taylor writings, visit http://www.freewebs.com/wealthgazette