Life is a wonderful adventure, if you view it that way. Life is jammed packed full of experiences of every variety, and all of which, with the proper perspective, can improve it immeasurably. The greatest mistake I have made in my life is trying to avoid failing, when failing is the only way to experience the greatest joys in life. So, are you ready to start failing successfully?
Wow, that sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? How can you fail successfully? That all depends how you define failure. For the sake of this blog, I will define failure as; things not working out the way you would have hoped. Have you ever noticed that when you try and avoid failure, as I just defined it, you either do nothing or try something very carefully and fail anyway? The problem with the perfectionism mindset, of which I am grateful not to have, is that the best way to avoid failure is by not trying it at all. Hence, many people give up, or never start in the pursuit of something uncertain because of this fear of failure.
What I would like to suggest is that you actually re-imagine failure as a successful step on the journey to creating any outcome you desire. That being said, and based on many years of spectacular failure, I would like to share some thoughts about how to successfully fail. As you may know, I am now a best-selling author of eight published books with number nine and ten on the way. There is no doubt that my greatest claim to fame was the impressive failure that started me on the journey.
At the time, I was working seven days per week, with two businesses, including a massively failing café that was losing money every day to the point of $100,000 debt. Then, out of desperation and looking for a solution to my circumstances, I made the illogical decision to write my first book. That $100,000 debt seems like a massive failure, however, with the perspective I have now, I know that it was actually a very small investment in the life of joy and abundance I currently live. That being the case, I deeply believe failure is actually a very good thing and can be the catalyst for incredible transformation. It all depends on how you look at it. Life is full of failure; losing money, rejection, other people’s opinion, missed opportunities, low scores, and losing stuff. Is it really bad? Is it devastating? Is it failure? Or, is it the only way to success?
The reality is that everything you want is on the other side of failure. Have you ever attempted something significant and got it exactly right on the first go? If so, it probably wasn’t that challenging or meaningful. Getting a date with that person you want is often littered with rejections and refusals until you get the date, and even then, you may have to work hard to create a relationship. I know that getting a book published doesn’t happen on the first submission, or the fifth, or the tenth, or even the twentieth. Selling your service, your idea, or your product will require massive failure before you achieve any real success. The truth is that the more you fail, the more you will eventually gain in return.
Probably the most important thing you will gain, even beyond finally achieving your desired result, is experience, lessons, and perspective. These are invaluable if you want to live your best life, and they only come through failure. So, get excited about failing, and do it more often. When you try something and it doesn’t work, you can review, modify, improve, and try again. When you get rejected, you can learn better ways to deal with people to get the desired outcome next time. When the worst-case scenario happens, you realise you will survive and even get stronger in many ways. These are all invaluable assets that you can only acquire through failure. So, fail fast and fail often.
Learning to love failing is just a decision. We all start with the ability to fail, and we all have failed at least once to this point in our life. The next stage is to start to develop a willingness to fail. Only 20% of people ever get to this stage. It is, however, the final stage, which only 5% of people get to, that will help you create abundance. That is a wantingness to fail. If you truly believed the faster you fail, the faster you will get where you want to be, then wanting to fail would simply become a natural position.
In my podcast this week with Dana S. Diaz, called Words always win, we discuss the power of words to determine the life we ultimately want. When we change the words we use around failure, then we will start to believe that failing forward is the only way to achieve the greatest life we can live. Make today the day you decide to start failing successfully.