I have failed in many things. In my relationship with myself, in other relationships and friendships, in starting businesses, launching products, making the money I want to make, putting ideas into action, learning new skills, having a healthy lifestyle.
Some are still a work in progress, in others I eventually succeeded: relationships and friendships, launching successful products, advancing my career rapidly, running a business, losing significant amount of weight, getting big pay rises, quitting smoking, eating a very healthy diet, running six days a week for over two years, quitting drinking alcohol, learning many new skills—languages, weightlifting, graphic and web design, cooking, riding a motorcycle.
Here are some of the things I have learned from failure and the fear of failure:
I’d rather fail than regret not trying.
You don’t figure things out when you’re outside of the arena. You figure them out when you’re in the arena. The only thing you need to figure out from the outset is that you need to step into the arena.
You don’t need a plan, just a next step, and then the one after that, and then the one after that.
To create motion, you need at least two things: consistency and exposure. Vacuum and darkness are not conducive to creation and action.
No one cares about what you’re up to or how good you’re at it. They’re too busy thinking that everyone cares about what they’re up to and how good they are at it.
You can succeed by either succeeding or by avoiding failure. But if you’re trying to avoid failure, you’re more likely to attract it than to succeed.
Planning is the absence of doing. The absence of doing is the absence of success.
Often the reason we don’t take action is because we’re guarding against something. There’s some perceived threat, often subconscious, that we’re protecting against. Ask yourself what it is that you are trying to prevent by not acting.
Our goals are driven by either avoidance or attraction. Both are reactionary to our past. We are either trying to prevent past disappointments from repeating or to recreate successes. As such—we are driven by the limitation of what has been, rather than by the expansiveness of what could be. If we think about this using an analogy of a house—we’re trying to escape the sad room and return to the happy one. A better approach is to leave all of that behind and build our dream house, or even better—dream castle.
The more you overanalyse the higher the stakes become because the time you’ve spent on thinking rather than acting increases a) the pressure to get it right and b) the threshold for what counts as success. Make peace with the wasted time. Sink the costs. And the best way to do so is by a) not regretting it and b) acting rather than wasting more time.
We often make complex plans when we’re afraid to act. We tell ourselves that we need them to minimise risk, but in fact we heighten risk by spending too long in the planning phase. Fear of failure is what gives rise to the attempt to minimise failure. The way to mitigate it is not by conceptualising it out, but by understanding that it’s an integral part of the process. The higher the risk the more spectacular the failure or success would be, and the greater the learning regardless of the outcome.
Your fear of failure is grounded in lies. In the lies that you’re not good enough, that you don’t have what it takes, that you are a loser, that you are different, that you don’t deserve to succeed—or whatever the dialogue of your inner critic is. Regardless of what you have or have not achieved, unless you’re telling yourself that you haven’t even scratched the surface of your potential, that your power and creativity are limitless, and that you’re pure possibility—you are lying to yourself.
No one cares about your failures as much as you do. And the reason you care about them is because you fear that they’ll expose your inadequacies—your not-enough-ness, your unlovability, your weaknesses. But your inadequacies are lies. They are not real. And the way to prevent the unreal from being exposed is not by avoiding failure, but by understanding that it’s unreal.