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Setbacks are Setups for a Comeback
Setbacks? Or Setups? How Every Obstacle Is Setting You Up for Your Greatest Comeback
You should know that setbacks are setups for a comeback. But first, let me ask you something. When life knocks you flat on your back — when the deal falls through, the diagnosis arrives, the relationship ends, or the career you built starts crumbling at the edges — what’s the first story you tell yourself?
For most people, that story sounds something like: This is the end. I’m done. I can’t come back from this.
I know that story well. In fact, I’ve lived it.
I was the kid in high school voted “Least Likely to Succeed.” On top of that, my guidance counselor told me I didn’t have the intelligence for college. Let that sink in for a second. The person whose entire job was to point me toward my future looked me dead in the eyes and said, essentially, Don’t bother.
That was a setback. A big one. And yet, it was far from the end.
But here’s what I’ve learned — and what I’ve spent decades sharing with audiences from American Express to the CIA, from Marriott Hotels to the Million Dollar Round Table — a setback is not the end of your story. Instead, it’s the setup for your comeback. Now, the question isn’t whether you’ll face setbacks. You will. We all do. Even so, the only real question is: What meaning will you give them?
With that in mind, let’s talk more about how setbacks are setups for a comeback.
Setbacks are Setups for a Comeback: The Mindset That Changes Everything
Here’s a truth that took me years to fully understand: your setback doesn’t define you. Your response to it, however, does.
Mindset is everything. I mean that literally — not as a motivational tagline, but rather as a fundamental operating principle for how life works. Your mindset is the set of thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and attitudes that shape how you see your business, your world, and yourself. As a result, it drives every action you take. And every action, in turn, leads to an outcome.
In other words, your mindset is literally writing the story of your life right now.
So if you’re in the middle of a setback, stop and ask yourself: What kind of story am I writing?
Are you writing a story where the setback is a full stop — an ending? Or, on the other hand, are you writing one where it’s a plot twist that launches you toward something greater?
Ultimately, the difference between those two stories is everything.
Setbacks are Setups for a Comeback: Setbacks Are Universal. Your Comeback Is Personal.
Every single person who has ever achieved anything meaningful has a story of failure, loss, rejection, or collapse that preceded their breakthrough. Not some of them. All of them.
For example, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
Similarly, Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first television job and told she was “unfit for TV.”
In the same way, Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for “lacking imagination.”
And perhaps most remarkably, J.K. Rowling was a broke, single mother on welfare when she was writing the first Harry Potter manuscript.
The list goes on and on. So what do all these people share? They didn’t quit when life got hard. Instead, they shifted. More specifically, it’s about how they reframed the setback as a setup — as information, as fuel, as a redirection toward something better.
Now, that’s not toxic positivity, or pretending everything is fine when it clearly isn’t. Rather, that’s strategic thinking — and furthermore, an understanding that where you are right now is not where you have to stay.
Ultimately, it’s about knowing that setbacks are setups for a comeback.
Setbacks are Setups for a Comeback: My Own Setup Disguised as a Setback
After years of working my way up as a national headline comedian — sharing marquees with Jerry Seinfeld, Eddie Murphy, Ellen DeGeneres, and Rodney Dangerfield, earning my Showtime Comedy All-Star special — I walked away.
At the top of my game, I walked away.
From the outside looking in, that probably looked like a setback. Maybe even a breakdown. But it was actually my biggest setup.
Comedy had given me an incredible platform. It taught me how to connect with any room, how to use laughter to lower people’s defenses, and how to make a message stick in a way that pure information never could. But I knew there was something more I was supposed to do with all of it. I had a burning desire to teach people how to be happy and successful regardless of their circumstances. Not just to get a laugh — but to change a life.
So I made the shift. I traded standing ovations as a comedian for something even more meaningful: helping people rediscover their own power to overcome, adapt, and succeed.
What looked like giving something up was actually stepping into the greatest chapter of my career. This is a big example of how setbacks are setups for a comeback.
That’s what setbacks do, if you let them. They force you off a path that was too small for you — and onto one that was always meant to be yours.
Setbacks are Setups for a Comeback: How to Shift a Setback Into a Setup: The Practical Side
Okay, so this all sounds great on paper. But what do you actually do when you’re in the middle of it? When the bottom has dropped out and you’re just trying to get through the day? How do you embody the idea that setbacks are setups for a comeback?
Here’s what I’ve found works — for me and for the thousands of people I’ve had the privilege of speaking with over the years.
1. Give yourself permission to feel it — but not to live in it.
There’s a difference between processing pain and setting up camp there. Acknowledge what happened. Grieve what needs to be grieved. Feel the frustration, the fear, the anger. Those are human emotions, and suppressing them doesn’t make you stronger — it just buries the problem.
But there’s a time limit. At some point, you have to make a conscious choice to shift from What happened to me? to What do I do now?
What’s Next
2. Change the question.
The questions you ask yourself create the direction your brain searches for answers. “Why does this always happen to me?” sends your brain hunting for evidence that you’re a victim. “What can I learn from this?” sends it searching for growth. “What opportunity might be hidden in this?” sends it looking for a door.
Start asking better questions. Your brain will follow.
3. Look for the lesson before you look for the exit.
Every setback has information in it. Maybe it’s telling you that you were in the wrong environment, pursuing the wrong goal, or operating from the wrong beliefs about yourself. Before you sprint toward the exit, sit long enough to ask: What is this trying to teach me?
Setbacks are setups for a comeback.Sometimes the setback is the most direct route to your next breakthrough — if you’re willing to mine it for what it’s worth.
More Strategies
4. Protect your inner circle.
The people around you during a setback matter enormously. Surround yourself with people who see your potential even when you’ve temporarily lost sight of it yourself. And protect yourself from the voices — internal and external — that want to confirm your worst fears about yourself.
You don’t need everyone to believe in you. You need enough people in your corner who do.
5. Reconnect with your “why.”
Setbacks have a way of making us forget why we started. When you’re in survival mode, the big picture gets blurry. Take time to reconnect with what drives you — your purpose, your values, the people you’re doing this for. That connection is the fuel that gets you through the hardest stretches.
The Comeback Is in the Shift
Here’s the thing about comebacks: they don’t just happen. They’re built — one shift at a time, one conscious choice at a time, one day at a time.
The shift from “this is the end” to “this is the setup” doesn’t mean you’re pretending the hard thing isn’t hard. It means you’re refusing to give it the final word.
I was voted Least Likely to Succeed, and told I wasn’t smart enough for college. I built a career, walked away from it, and built something bigger and more meaningful in its place. None of that happened because life was easy. It happened because I learned — often the hard way — that the story you tell yourself about your setback becomes the blueprint for your comeback.
So ask yourself right now: What setback are you sitting in? And what if — what if — it’s actually the most important setup of your life?
The answer to that question could change everything. Again: don’t forget that setbacks are setups for a comeback.
Setbacks are Setups for a Comeback: Final Thought: Wow Is Me
One of the things I talk about on stage is the shift from Woe is me to Wow is me. Not as a denial of difficulty, but as a deliberate choice to approach life with wonder, curiosity, and a belief that you are more capable than your circumstances suggest.
The people who make the greatest comebacks aren’t the ones who avoided the hardest hits. They’re the ones who got hit — hard — and chose to get back up with a different perspective.
Your setback is not your sentence. It’s your setup.
Setbacks are setups for a comeback.
Now go make the comeback.
Steve Rizzo is a Hall of Fame funny Keynote Speaker, former Showtime Comedy All-Star, and bestselling author of Motivate THIS! and Get Your SHIFT Together. He has spoken for organizations including American Express, the CIA, Marriott, and hundreds more. To bring Steve to your next event, visit steverizzo.com.
