Alex, a very dear friend of mine, once said that the \"fear of failure belongs in the realm of the pauper and the fool.\" His logic was that the only way not to fail is not to try. If you never try anything, you may not risk failure in the short term, but in the long run your whole life becomes a failure. Which is the greater catastrophe? And that\'s not all.

Now Alex, though far from being handsome, would approach the prettiest woman in the club to ask her to dance. Yes, most refused, but many more than I would have guessed agreed. He never approached a woman with the attitude, \"she\'ll do.\" I never saw him with a woman who wasn\'t ravishing. But Alex didn\'t stop there.

He approached his business the same way. He began network marketing in the late 1970\'s. He initially lost $12,000.00 on a company that went belly up six months after he joined. So, he joined another network marketing company. Although that company was much more stable, he still couldn\'t figure out how to make a profit.

He was going down fast. If something didn\'t change soon . . .

I remember his attitude in those days was anything but negative. Of course, he wasn\'t overjoyed he was losing his shirt, but he never once cursed his situation. I remember he kept asking himself, \"What am I not seeing? Others are successful at this, so what\'s holding me back?\" And then it happened . . .

He started attending motivational seminars, taking classes at the community college, and reading books on success. Then, one day he met Zig Ziglar. I still don\'t know what happened at that meeting, but it changed Alex forever.

Within a year after meeting Mr. Ziglar, Alex was able to quit his job and do his business fulltime. In five years, he was earning six figures. By 1990, Alex was a multimillionaire. Today he\'s a missionary in Fiji with his beautiful wife and six kids. He\'s still with the same company, and God only knows how much he\'s worth.

Alex taught me that when you fear something, you are beginning to move closer to the truth. Most of us delude ourselves, tucked safely away in our comfort zones, that ours is the only \"true\" world. That fear of the unknown reminds us that we are self-imprisoned, and the moment we feel that fear we become aware of our prison walls.

Society has labeled failure as something bad, something we want to avoid. How many times did Edison fail when trying to invent the light bulb? I\'ve heard 1,000 or more times. If he couldn\'t invent the light bulb on his first try, then why should you be expected to succeed on your first try at something? And then, again . . .

If you\'re just getting started in network marketing, say this to yourself: I will fail many times. Failure is my teacher. Failure shows me the path that will not help me achieve my goals.

Have you ever seen the movie, \"Next,\" starring Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore? In it, Cage\'s character has the ability to send out duplicates of himself into the future to explore his best option to solve a situation. One of his duplicates gets shot, another one gets blown up by a bomb, and another one gets there too late. He finds the one that arrives on time, however, and saves the day.

Consider failure as one of your duplicates, like a process of elimination. You might not know right now how to get to where you\'re going, but with failure on your side you know how not to get there.

Like a process of elimination, eventually all of the unworkable routes to your goal will have been explored, and the path to your success will become clear. Without failure, this is not possible.