Bratty Girl

Although my past is a combination of 50 percent failure and 50 percent success, I don't regret any of my past failures I've encountered in my life. But the good thing is failures are already a dead issue for me. If I'll drag past failures behind me, I can't gain momentum moving towards tomorrow. And I don't want to follow the footsteps of people who drag their failures and hurts with them wherever they go. And the result is, they have had never make any progress.

I made lot of mistakes in my life, or I had an especially difficult past with many obstacles. But thank God, with the learned right kind of attitude, I had surpassed them all by working my way through it and moving on. Other individuals who had overcome tragedies or mistakes to pursue their potentials, and well known personalities who fought back from adversity and become a successful person, inspired me to developed my potential to overcome past hurts and obstacles and continually grow with the right attitude and thinking towards obstacles and failures. Now I know that obstacles must not prevent me from reaching my potential and goal.

I remember a Spanish proverb says, “A person who does not look ahead remains behind”. That is true. Mistakes, hurts and failures from the past will remain if we do not look ahead. I mean focus creating solutions, not problems. Past mistakes create problems within our journey if we drag our past hurts. It will prevent us to move forward. We should focus on the future and use the past as a learning experience.

I’ve also learned that we should not let failures go to our heads. Instead of dwelling on the negative consequences of failure, we must learn from our mistakes and think about how we can improve our situation and ourselves. We should understand that failure could either bog us down or help us along our journey depending on our attitude towards it. A Failure remains a failure unless we don't learn from it. If we're not continually learning, we're going to make the same mistakes over and over again. It's okay if we fall down as long as we learn something as we get up.

Everyone has had failures from the past. The fact that we have been knocked down is interesting to others who are against us and those who don't believe on us (don't mind them). The important is the length of time we remain down and the things we learn while we're down and how we get up.

I never looked at the consequences of missing a big shot. Why? Because when you think about the consequences you always think as a negative result.

Some people get frozen by that fear of failure. They get it from peers or from just thinking about the possibility of a negative result. They might be afraid of looking bad or being embarrassed. I realized that if I was going to achieve anything in life I had to be aggressive. I had to get out there and go for it. I don't believe you can achieve anything by being passive. I'm not thinking about anything except what I'm trying to accomplish. Any fear is an illusion. You think something is standing in your way, but nothing is really there. What is there is an opportunity to do your best and gain some success. If it turns out my best isn't good enough, then at least I'll never be able to look back and say I was too afraid to try. Failure always made me try harder the next time.

That's why my advice has always been to 'think positive' and find fuel in any failure. Sometimes failure actually just gets you closer to where you want to be. If I'm trying to fix a car, every time I try something that doesn't work, I'm getting closer to finding the answer. The greatest inventions in the world had hundreds of failures before the answer were found.

I think fear sometimes comes from a lack of focus or concentration. If I had stood at the free-throw line and thought about 10 million people watching me on the other side of the camera lens, I couldn't have made anything. So I mentally put myself in a familiar place. I thought about all those times I shot free throws in practice and went through the same motion, the same technique I had used thousands of times. You forget about the outcome. You know that you are doing the right things. So relax and perform. After that you can't control anything anyway. It's out of your hands so don't worry about it.

I approached practices the same way I approached games. But that's not how a lot of people approach things. And that's why they fail. If you are trying to achieve, there will be roadblocks. I've had them, everybody has had them.

But obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.

Michael Jordan