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JP did the opposite. First, she realized that they made a bad decision, not that she did a

bad job (good call). And second, she quickly understood that if she let the resistance

stand up and say, "I told you so," she'd be giving in. Give in to the resistance and you

might never recover.

Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure

differently.

Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one. They

don't learn that they shouldn't have tried in the first place, and they don't learn that they

are always right and the world is wrong and they don't learn that they are losers. They

learn that the tactics they used didn't work or that the person they used them on didn't

respond.

You become a winner because you're good at losing. The hard part about losing is that

you might permit it to give strength to the resistance, that you might believe that you

don't deserve to win, that you might, in some dark corner of your soul, give up.

Don't.

Seeking Out Discomfort

Going out of your way to find uncomfortable situations isn't natural, but it's essential.

The resistance seeks comfort. The resistance wants to hide. At work, we spend hours (and

millions of dollars) seeking a place we can defend, a market position and sinecure we can

feel safe in. Corporations watch their stocks soar when they can describe a comfortable

market niche that will generate profits for years to come. College professors often pick

the profession because of the comfort that tenure brings. Salespeople embrace the script

because using one is more comfortable than engaging with the prospect. Bosses resist

giving direct and useful feedback to employees because it's momentarily uncomfortable.

The road to comfort is crowded and it rarely gets you there. Ironically, it's those who seek

out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.

Inevitably, we exaggerate just how uncomfortable we are. An uncomfortable seat on a

long airplane flight begins to feel like a open wound. This exaggeration makes it even

more likely that embracing the discomfort that others fear is likely to deliver real

rewards.

Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you're doing something

that others were unlikely to do, because they're busy hiding out in the comfortable zone.

When your uncomfortable actions lead to success, the organization rewards you and

brings you back for more.

Developing Plan B

Well-meaning friends and advisers never hesitate to reach out to artists. They suggest we

have a backup plan, something to fall back on if the art thing doesn't work out so well.

You've probably guessed what happens when you have a great backup plan: You end up

settling for the backup. As soon as you say, "I'll try my best," instead of "I will," you've

opened the door for the lizard.

The resistance desperately seeks to sabotage your art. A well-defined backup plan is

sabotage waiting to happen. Why push through the dip, why take the risk, why blow it all

when there's the comfortable alternative instead? The people who break through usually

have nothing to lose, and they almost never have a backup plan.

Where Are All the Good Ideas?

When someone says to me, "I don't have any good ideas . . . I'm just not good at that," I

ask them, "Do you have any bad ideas?"

Nine times out of ten, the answer is no. Finding good ideas is surprisingly easy once you

deal with the problem of finding bad ideas. All the creativity books in the world aren't

going to help you if you're unwilling to have lousy, lame, and even dangerously bad

ideas.

The resistance abhors bad ideas. It would rather have you freeze up and invent nothing

than take a risk and have some portion of your output be laughable. Every creative person

I know generates a slew of laughable ideas for every good one. Some people (like me)

need to create two slews for every good one.

One way to become creative is to discipline