Would you rather be right, or successful?

You can’t fail to have noticed that there’s quite a lot of football going on at the moment!

Whether you love it or hate it, it has been difficult to avoid.

If you hate it and did manage to avoid it, well done to you.

Being born in Wrexham to English parents, I consider myself “Welshlish”. That way I can have the best of both worlds. It also means I can get excited about the World Cup but not devastated if things don’t go too well.

However, after watching England versus Germany on Sunday all I can say is “Oh dear!”

 

What went wrong?

For me it wasn’t the manner of defeat or that it was the worst defeat in World Cup history for England that was the worst thing, it was much worse than that.

It was the overall “British” media reaction to the defeat.

When things started to go well, one newspaper got right behind the team saying that they could now go all the way.

Days later after the Germany defeat the headline in the same newspaper was “We KNEW this was going to happen”. How very sad.

And therein lies the lesson; you can be “right” or successful, you cannot be both!

How does our brain choose between right and successful?

Allow me to explain. People use justification and prediction to make allowances for failure.

Put another way, you can defend your existing beliefs if you wish, but it’s not going to get you a different result.

You can justify why you’re overweight or you can start to change your eating habits and exercise.

You can rationalise why your relationship is no longer passionate or you can surprise your partner with a special date for two.

You can blame everyone else (and the current climate) as to why your business isn’t working or you can solve the problems and start making money again.

You can “believe” you’re addicted to Nicotine or you can give your children the best gift ever and seek help to become a healthy non smoker.

It’s very easy to “play safe” and have excuses that protect you from “losing”. However, if you want your life to be extraordinary, an example to others, you MUST do things differently to everyone else.

Ask yourself “Do I want to be right (by fitting in with general consensus of how the world is) or do I want to be successful and happy?” then go and do something different!