Well, the final figures are just over $15,000. Any way you spin it, that's a long way from what we were shooting for. I would love to be telling you how excited we are about reaching our goal and raising over $10K for charity.

Unfortunately, that's not the case.

But I want to use this experience to share with you some of my views on failure and some suggestions on how to deal with defeat. Because if you truly go for your goals, you will sometimes miss them. In fact, if you always reach all of your goals, you're not setting them high enough or going after enough of them.

Debrief and Learn
One of the things we'll be doing over the days ahead is debrief what we did, what we didn't do and how we will do things differently next time. We're in the process of analyzing what worked and what didn't.

This is a valuable process to go through after ANY project—whether it was a raging success or a serious crash and burn. The important thing is not to blame or judge actions and inactions harshly. Be gentle with yourself, but also be honest with yourself.

I will meet with my apprentice team and my mastermind team as well as customers to get feedback as to what they saw, what they liked and didn't like about the entire process. We may also do a survey.

After collecting this data, we will determine what we feel are the most important lessons so that next time we can do better.

Don’t Let Fear Stop You
The fear of failure prevents most people from setting and achieving their goals. But if you can come to accept failure as part of the process of achieving goals, you will make a lot more progress and have a lot more fun.

Wise Counsel
Obviously we don’t want to fail more than we have to, so I'm not advocating taking unnecessary risks or being careless.

That's why it's important to seek out good advice. Talk to people who have done it before. Pay for expert advice. It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel. Experience is a good teacher, but it's also expensive—and sometimes painful.

Worst Case
One of the things that helps me go for the big ones is being willing to accept the worst-case scenario. The worst that I could imagine for this sale was $10,000.

I wanted to hit $100,000--even though we'd never done anything close to that. But if $10k was about the worst I could envision, and I could live with that, then why not go for it?

Start Over
When you fall short, you have to be ready to start over. Learn what you can, dust yourself off, make adjustments and begin anew. You are only a failure if you quit.

Share Your Losses
I also think it's a good idea to share your failures as well as your successes. Not to dwell on them, but to help others see your defeat as temporary. Your failures are part of your story. They enable others to relate to your experience. Because they fail, too.

Look for the Good
It's important to recognize and acknowledge what you DID do. In our case, we added over $15,000 in sales for the month of October. We're giving over $1500 for small loans to micropreneurs. We got some great products into our subscribers' hands at super-low prices. We added more than 1600 subscribers during the sale, got some decent press and picked up new Gold and Diamond Members. We furthered our mission. And we also learned a lot.

It may sound like a cliché but it's true. It's better to have played and lost than never to have played at all.

Never be afraid to fail. Rather be afraid of not trying.