How to have a winning mindset

Picture an Olympic athlete crossing a winning line, all their years of hard work and training building up to this moment of victory, followed by parades, parties and corporate events. The TV interviewer asks, "Is this the moment you've been training for?" and the athlete replies, "No, the training never stops".

Whether you ask an athlete or an entrepreneur, you'll get a similar answer, that these moments are not the moment of victory, they're simply the moments when someone cared about the result.

In reality, athletes are training every week, trying to improve their own game and better their own best. They don't care about what anyone else is doing, because they can't control what anyone else is doing. Business success isn't quite the same, because your competitors' behaviour changes your customers' expectations, and if you don't respond you risk getting left behind. All of the players in a market create that market, so when one does something new, the market changes.

In a competitive environment, you're under constant pressure to adapt and innovate, so what's the mindset that leads to success?

Surprisingly, the winning mindset is not obsessed with winning. If anything, the winner's focus is on losing.

You learn nothing from success, you simply reinforce what you already think and do. If you want to innovate, you have to do something new, and that starts by realising that what you're doing isn't working. The founder of Sony, Masaru Ibuka, once said that his company's mission was to make itself obsolete. This simple focus created a culture of innovation based on one truth; that if you don't put yourself out of business, someone else will.

You will only learn from failure, but corporate targets and a lifetime of being judged makes most people work to avoid it. The risk of failure takes you to the edge of your comfort zone, and that's the only place that you'll find innovation. Whatever the field of human endeavour, advances are only made on the very edges of what we know to be possible. Failure teaches you to do something new, something different, and that is the essence of the winning mindset.

You've probably heard the cliché that "failure is not an option". If you want to learn, if you want to innovate and, ultimately, if you want to win, then failure is the only option.

The only thing wrong with failure is that you've been told it's bad. In fact, failure is just feedback and if you can see it from that neutral, objective angle then you will learn from every failure. What you learn will make you better, faster, stronger. By enjoying every setback as a piece of valuable feedback, you'll progress further and faster than you could imagine, and you'll definitely achieve more than the person who plays it safe, who stays in the comfort zone and sticks to what they know.

That's the winning mindset.