Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.

—Marlon Brando

There is another hidden agenda working behind the scenes, fouling our understanding and relationship with business and selling. We have to come face to face with it, or we will not move forward. It is our own fears of inadequacy, self-worth, and failure.

As with the concepts of money and sales, the Awakened Millionaire has an entirely different, counterintuitive understanding of failure from most people, and it's simple.

What are every entrepreneur's deepest, darkest fears? We put our product out there, and nobody buys it. Then we think the mission has no value. Our self-worth was an illusion. We have failed.

We put our product out there, and then we see another one that's uncomfortably similar. We think, there is too much competition. How can I contend with everyone else?

We put our product out there, people buy it, but they complain bitterly. Again, we have failed. I must have been wrong.

But we have not failed.

Awakened Millionaires do not have failure in their vocabulary.

There is no such thing as failure; there is only feedback.

Feedback is a beautiful thing to the Awakened Millionaire. Whether it comes in the form of happy customers, deafening silence, or a cacophonous uproar, it's all feedback.

The Awakened Millionaire welcomes every kind of feedback because it is the gateway to opportunity.

Feedback = Opportunity

Life is a big Choose Your Own Adventure book. Nowhere is that more apparent than when we look at how we each react to failure. The choices we make in moments of failure are some of the most impactful of our lives.

A woman is inspired to become a stand-up comic. She wants nothing more than to make people laugh. She practices her first routine a hundred times. She records herself, studies her timing, and tweaks her cadence, her emphasis, every detail. Her big night comes, and she's met with an audience of crickets. She is devastated.

She goes home, drinks half a bottle of wine, and goes to sleep. In the next few weeks, she talks to her friends about making some changes to the routine and trying again, but she can't face the disappointment one more time. She puts it off, and puts it off. She never gets back to another comedy club, and her dream is shelved.

Or she goes home, drinks half a bottle of wine, and goes to sleep. (There's no shame in a brief pity party.) The next day she thinks about the audience. It's painful to remember their unsmiling faces, but she forces herself to. Come to think of it, they were an awfully young crowd. There was a kind of post-grad vibe in there. It's no wonder they didn't get her jokes about being a single cat lady in her thirties. She decides to try another venue that has a slightly older crowd. It's nerve wracking, but she does the same exact routine, and gets laughs.

Or the next day, she asks a few friends to come over and be her captive audience. Her friends have a great reaction to the routine, but she figures, of course they do; they wouldn't tell me if I was bad. But afterwards, one of them says something she never considered. The friend says it took a while to get her sense of humor—it was so different from anything she'd heard. Maybe there was a way to prime the audience, give them an opportunity to get it before launching into the routine. She gives it a shot, and her next performance gets laughs.

Or the next day, she reaches out to the manager at the club where she performed. She asks him for his genuine thoughts on her routine. It's tough to listen to what he has to say, but she sees the truth in a lot of what he says, and realizes there were a lot of things she didn't pick up on by critiquing herself. She makes some tweaks in the routine and tries it again. This time she gets a lot of smiles and some light laughter. She talks to the manager again afterwards, who has nothing but encouraging things to say. He tells her to keep at it, keep making improvements. She does, and the manager becomes something of a mentor to her.

There is only one option to fail and give up in this story. There are many options to move forward, make discoveries, make changes, and shake things up. A million ways to move forward.

We get the opportunity to ask questions: What's next? How can we make this better? What can we tweak? Were we in the right place? Were we at the right time? What can we add? What can we remove? Are we talking to the right people? How can we turn this into something good? What is the hidden product or service?

These opportunities are the gifts our customers give to us. The goal of every mission is to give them value, to give them what they want or need, to give them our best. Through feedback, they tell us everything we need to know in order to do that. We only need to listen.

Back in 1984 a struggling author tried to sell a six-lesson course on how to write; he marketed it using a classified ad. He struggled to get the money for the ad. But he did. The ad bombed. Was it a failure? No. It was feedback. The young man took the six lessons, weaved them into a book, and it became his first published book. I know. It was my book, Zen and the Art of Writing. Seeing it published was a defining moment in my life, but it didn't come until after a failure.

Hit a roadblock, go around it. Stumble. Stand up. Have a setback. Keep going, faster. Face a challenge. Out-think it. Hit a wall. Scale it.

The choice is ours to take in feedback, and then let it show us our opportunity. We don't always know where opportunity will take us, but all paths lead to success.