Failure. The mortal enemy of every perfectionist and the greatest obstacle on your path to success. The fear of being rejected, the fear of losing your job, the fear of being misunderstood, and pretty much every other fear that pervades humanity are in one way or another a different version of the fear of failure. Why is it that we as a human race are so afraid to fail? At what point did we learn that failure is a bad thing? It’s so obviously a bad thing that it seems silly to question it, but that is perhaps why it is so important to question it.

I think it’s mainly a matter of perspective. If you look at failure for what society has taught it to be, which is the difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful one, you will learn to fear it. And why wouldn’t you? Nobody wants to be branded a failure. Nobody goes on social media and posts about all the things that they’ve failed to accomplish. Nobody brags about all the times they’ve been passed over for a promotion, or projects they’ve never finished. Nobody likes to show that side of themselves because they think it represents weakness. But if you have learned to see failure for what it really is, simply a stepping stone on the path to success, you will come to see it as a necessity. Nobody becomes a raging success without taking a few shots to the gut first.

Perhaps you have heard of the pendulum of life before. Think of it like this, imagine a pendulum swinging back and forth. On one side of the pendulum are all the negatives of life: fear, failure, rejection, pain, embarrassment, and hatred. And on the other side of the pendulum exist all the positives of life: confidence, success, acceptance, pleasure, humor, and love. As a living person, you get to choose how much your pendulum swings but know that by the very laws of physics if a pendulum swings a certain amount of distance to one side then it has to swing the same amount of distance to the other side. Most people will only choose to swing their pendulum a few degrees in either direction. This is what is known as the comfort zone. You will experience minimal success living in such a manner, but you will also only suffer minimal failures. Those who are unwilling to live a mediocre life will choose to swing their pendulum much further than the comfort zone, and they in turn will experience great success, these are the rich and the famous, and the most fulfilled amongst us. But with great success also comes great failure. Behind every successful person is a long string of painful and harsh failures.

To put it another way, it takes effort to obtain success, it takes massive action, it takes vulnerability, and it takes attempt after attempt after attempt. And quite a few of those attempts will result in failure. That is statistically just how the world works. Failure doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong; it means you’re doing something right! It is at the end of the day, just a matter of perspective. Learn to see failure for what it really is. Not as a sign to give up, or an indication that you’re moving in the wrong direction. Recognize that failure is the price you must pay to obtain your success. Take heart in your failures, find the lesson in them, and move on to the next one. Eventually, you will obtain success, and more failure, and more success. The more you succeed, the more you fail. The greater the joy, the more pain and hurt you must go through first. Choose to keep going, choose to change your perspective, and choose to succeed.

Topics to Talk About in Podcast

• Failure is one of those things that we have to talk about if we want to do anything worthwhile with our lives - we have to talk about it because its something that you’re inevitably going to experience and its important that you receive its presence in your life in the most effective way so that you don’t get discouraged or pulled away from your path
• The best way the importance of failure has ever been explained to me is through a pendulum - the pendulum of life
• The role of society in demonizing failure, and how we as a new generation of society must strive to reframe things not just for our sake but for the sake of those around and those that will come after us
  • This goes back to how we were raised and probably even more than that how we were all put through the public school system which absolutely demonizes failure
  • Example from Adam Grant’s book think again - drawing butterflies over and over again - elementary school kids age 6-7; wildly successful within the scope of the book - not aware of any large scale implementation of the same idea outside of this experiment
    • gives us a wonderful replacement philosophy for the one that we were all taught as kids
      • the scientific method - where the point isn’t to find the right answer, it’s to test potential answers, to experiment, collect data, evaluate your hypothesis and then rinse and repeat - do this in your regular life
      • The beauty is that there is no end to this process - and if you don’t give up, then you can’t fail - you don’t have to work faster or be smarter or any of that stuff, you just have to not stop
• Taking this back to the real world, anytime you’re trying to do anything, it’s going to take some trial and error to get a good result
  • dating - whether it’s trial and error with the same person or with different people
  • fitness - learning techniques, finding what you enjoy
  • making money and finding a job you like - budgeting and personal finance knowledge
  • accomplishing big things, difficult things - kind of like playing video games or really any game, board game, physical game or otherwise
• The most effective way to look at failure, don’t see failure as a sign that you’re doing something wrong, see it as a sign that you’re doing something right. Because to make something work you’re going to have to try lots of different ways and lots of different things and trying lots of things necessarily means that not all of them are going to work. It’s a numbers game and an endurance game, and you can’t lose if you don’t give up