Failure sucks. Nobody likes to fail. It doesn’t feel good, it can exacerbate our doubts, it can even be debilitating. A lot of people dread failure because they feel embarrassed by it. It can make you feel like you’re not good enough. Sometimes we think others will think poorly of us.
Some people derive joy from our failures. But that’s a whole other can of worms.
But all of this is the product of our mindset. Our perception of it. Failure, in reality, is not even really failure. Quitting, giving up, throwing in the towel—that’s the real failure. Quitting is the only failure.
Think about what you consider failure, and realize that the road to success consists of lots of these moments. It’s true. The most successful people out there “failed” multiple times before achieving their goals. The problem is, as spectators, we don’t see all these failures. We only see the highlights, so we mistakenly assume they have the magic touch. Have you ever heard a band that seemed to get big overnight? People call them overnight successes, but that’s not actually the case. Look them up and read the bio. You’ll see that they’ve been around a lot longer than you thought. They played tiny shows where the only people in the audience were the other bands playing that night. They struggled to build an audience and get fans. They practiced and practiced some more. They were not overnight successes.
Successful people have a different mindset about failure. They don’t see failure as failure at all—they see it as opportunity. Each setback is an opportunity to move closer to your goal. But how? It is an opportunity to learn from the setback, to reflect on what happened so you can make adjustments. You cannot make adjustments unless you first recognize there is a need for adjustment. Without that feedback, you won’t know that you need to change and improve something. Second, each setback provides an incentive to get better.
Failure is just a temporary moment in time, especially if you utilize it. You must transform failure into something that provides a benefit, which helps propel you closer to your goal. Dustin Hoffman once said, “It’s true what they say about failure. You don’t learn from success.” If you only get things right the first time, you have no way of ever improving. You can’t grow. There’s no leveling up.
You must adopt the mindset of embracing setbacks and changing your perspective about them. How can you use this as an opportunity?
Failure is not final unless you allow yourself to quit. In order to succeed at any goal, you must learn to cultivate your tenacity, your resolve. Persist. Many people shy away from adversity, because it’s uncomfortable. They balk at challenge. They want things to be easy. They don’t fight for what they want. They give up at the first sign of trouble. They don’t learn from their setbacks, which enables them to make improvements. They say that many people give up at the moment when success is right around the corner. So keep going. Learn to recognize progress when you see it, no matter how small. Progress is still progress. You don’t need to make leaps and bounds overnight.
Even entirely failed projects, to successful people, aren’t looked at as failures. Because they always admit that they needed to learn those lessons in order to apply them to the successful stuff. Seriously, ask any of them.
Eat the Elephant
Another key component of making your willpower last is to learn to eat the elephant one bite at a time. Don’t focus your thoughts on how far you have left to go. That can be daunting. Instead, shift your focus on taking small steps, and acknowledging that you’re still moving forward. You’re getting closer. Even if you can’t accomplish a big task today, use your time wisely. Find every opportunity to make small progress, and learn to reward yourself for this. No matter what the goal is, if you keep making progress, you are moving in the right direction. Break larger tasks up into smaller ones. Set milestones and then break those up into smaller milestones. The most important thing is to never stop, no matter how big the setback. Rise like the phoenix, only resolve yourself to come back stronger and better than before.
If you always improve the next iteration, you never regret the previous one.
One of the ways I have consistently used setbacks to my advantage is with writing. There have been several times in my life where I labored on some piece I was writing and for one reason or another I lost the material. I forgot to save. The computer shut down or the battery died. It is very frustrating. But each time this happened I made a deal with myself. I told myself I would rewrite what was lost, only I would try to write it better than I did before. And guess what happened? Each time I made the piece better, and when I did that it made me realize that the setback was actually a blessing. If I wouldn’t have lost the material, it wouldn’t have turned out as awesome. So in this way I was able to change my mindset to end up being thankful I had lost those parts. I was then glad for the setback. In the moment, though, I certainly didn’t view it as a good thing.
Transform your setbacks into opportunities to do things better the next time around and you will never regret them. Babies who are learning to walk fall down hundreds of times (the average two-year-old falls 38 times a day). And yet they persist! If a baby can keep going, so can you! Don’t think of failure as failure.
Quitting is the only failure.
-Janden
What’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told? How did that play out?
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