Rebecca Scarberry got divorced and lost her job in the same week in December 2008. She turned to her kitchen stove, a source of comfort since childhood, and cooked up a caramel business.

A signature rum cake that Marlene Squires-Swanson traditionally baked for Christmas gift-giving became her salvation after she was laid off.

Life threw them lemons. And they made rum cake, potato salad and caramels.
They networked at the gym, at church, at the mall—even on an airplane—striking up conversations with strangers and casual acquaintances about their ideas. Scarberry and Squires-Swanson tapped technical colleges for advice and sold their creations at farmers markets; all three set up websites.

Instead of spending Thanksgiving Day depressed and unemployed in a tight job market, these Wisconsin entrepreneurs focused on creating their own success.
- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2009 Thanksgiving Edition

We are certainly living in trying times; however, as I heard from a wise man, "At times like this, you must remember there have always been times like this." You can let the situation beat you down and sap you of your energy and desire, or you can seize the initiative and take action. These three people didn't let the situation shape them—they shaped the situation. Management consultant Peter Drucker once said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it!"

The things that have made America great have been our attitude of independence, ingenuity and willingness to accept a challenge.

Conrad Hilton once said: "Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit."
President Obama's message to our children also applies to adults. I'm not sure how many of you had the opportunity to listen to the President's address on the value of education, but I thought it was a powerful message. As I read the transcript of the address I noticed some parts of it that clearly apply to all of us.

Here is part of what he said:

Being successful is hard. You won't love every subject you study. You won't click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right at this minute. And you won't necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That's OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures. J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understand that you can't let failures define you—you have to let them teach you.

Many people don't take risks, because they are afraid to fail. What they don't understand is not taking any risks is the biggest risk of all. No one can predict the future, so we can't accurately forecast whether or not we will succeed, but we can continue to try. As the saying goes, "You will miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take."

We are all familiar with the saga of Thomas Edison and the creation of the light bulb. He tried one filament after another, experiencing one failure after another. At one point a reporter asked him if he felt he had failed. Edison replied that he had not failed, that he had discovered over 5,000 ways NOT to make a working light bulb.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA once commented, "Only while sleeping do you make no mistakes. Mistakes are the privilege of the active person, who can start over and put things right."

It is only through attempting new things that we make progress. If we are doing things that we have never done before, we will undoubtedly make mistakes. The key is to not fear mistakes, but to embrace them as a means of finding success. Successful companies realize this and they try new things, and then fail—though they may fail often and fail fast, they fail forward.

Dr. Joyce Brothers once said, "There's a very positive relationship between people's ability to accomplish any task and the time they're willing to spend on it."
Don't be afraid of failure; learn from it and grow.

		Bob Wangen is the president of Implement Improvement in DeWitt and a certified manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence. Wangen is a local consultant who specializes in project management, business improvement and leadership development. Learn more by visiting            www.implementimprovement.com