though everything else has failed. They know that it’s impossible for people to be successful all the time, and the easiest way to protect yourself against disappointment is to anticipate complications along the way. When you look at it from the right perspective, the 80/20 rule is exciting. Even though eighty percent of your work won’t get you the results you want, twenty percent of your work will provide you with everything you need. There is always going to be a degree of uncertainty because you don’t know which projects will succeed and which ones will fail. It is normal to want to predict the future, but how boring would that be if you knew for certain that everything you were doing was going to be a success? To some extent, the majority of us thrive on uncertainty; and if you persevere, your very best work might be just around the corner. If you give up now, you will never know what the outcome of your hard work could have been. Top performers fail all the time, but they understand that all they need is a couple of major successes to set them up for life—the same principle applies to you too. It doesn’t matter if you come up with some terrible ideas, what matters is that you keep going. How To HANDLE FAILURE There is a lesson to learn from every failure; therefore, use your losses as a springboard to greater things. When something doesn’t work out the way you had planned, evaluate it to find out what went wrong, and don’t get hung up on the fact that it didn’t work out. If you can’t get anything out of it, at least it gave you the opportunity to practice self-discipline. When you discover what does work, build on it for repeated success. This might sound like common sense, but people struggle with this because there is such a huge difference between what worked and what they were expecting to work. Evaluating this takes selfdiscipline because when you have an emotional investment in something, it’s difficult to put it to one side. What ends up happening is that because we are emotionally attached to something, we keep working at it even if it’s burning a hole in our pocket, and being overly driven by a passion can have a negative effect on our psychological well-being. When this is looked at objectively, it’s hard to understand. The person with no emotional attachment can look at the project and see that it’s not working, as well as see why it’s not working. But the person who has an emotional attachment to it will find it hard to admit they’ve made a mistake and pride will not allow them to walk away from a failing project. On the other hand, if you are able to accept that your efforts are not going to give