Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart. There is something to be taken from this quotation. Business men and women everywhere usually have at least one thing in common. Before tasting success, they have all tasted failure. In fact, it is quite rare to find someone who is a success that has never experienced some kind of failure in their past. The truth is that this failure can help us or it can hinder us. When we dwell on our past, whether it is business related or even personal, it can really drag us down.



It's like spending the entire movie looking back toward the theater door, wishing you hadn't spilled your popcorn. After a while, you realized that because you were dwelling on this, you missed the entire movie. It is very important to put past successes, failures and other matters where they belong; in the past. Once we have properly placed the past in the past, we can look toward the future with businesses and careers. Part of placing the past in the past is accepting that the failure we have experienced has all been part of a learning process to get you to this point. Now, armed with the lessons of the past, you can be truly successful.

One important part of accepting the failure as lessons is to evaluate your relationships. Do you have business partners, acquaintances or friends that you feel are holding you back? You may not even realize that they are holding you back until you really evaluate the situation. Often times we hang on to relationships with people simply because that is the way it has always been. We don't really evaluate whether these relationships are productive or beneficial, because that person is someone that we have accepted in our lives and we haven't thought of changing it. It is very important to have a deep look into the relationships we carry.

If this is true for relationships, what about old companies, business ventures, etc? Have you had a good look at them? Are they successful and fruitful or are you simply hanging onto them because they are there? Is it because there is a lot of emotion attached to them? The truth is that if it is not productive, you need to evaluate and let it go. You can't swim toward the shore of success if you are laden down with unnecessary burdens. Take a good hard look at your burdens and decide which ones you should let go of. Ensure that you don't get tired of swimming before you reach the shore because you have been carrying too much from the past. Your past is only a school. Your present and future are determined by what you learned in school and how well you applied it.