“CHOP” Your Career Defeats

“Defeat is a state of mind. No one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as reality. To me, defeat in anything is merely temporary, and its punishment is but an urge for me to greater effort to achieve my goal. Defeat simply tells me that something is wrong in my doing; it is a path leading to success and truth.” Bruce Lee 1940-1973, Martial Artist, Actor and Author

Cool quote. So do you find your self – you know – giving up. Just accepting that a lousy job/career/situation is just something you have to live with. A ‘necessary evil’. Bruce Lee gives a different angle.

What if it were true. There’s a school of thought that says that failures are our greatest opportunity for growth. Easy to say, huh? They feel pretty darn “just-give-up-and-make-the-pain-go-away-ish” at the time.

But if we can manage to take Bruce Lee’s advice here – chop, chop – changing the way we look at our defeats (ie not as conclusive, definitive proof that our goals and aspirations are just plain WRONG!) then instead of losing heart, we gain in knowledge, experience, and determination every time we have a tough situation. We drive through. We change tactics. We persist. We adjust our approach. And eventually we win.

Not easy to do this. But is just giving up really a more attractive option?