One of the most toxic thought patterns to come out of the 90s and 2000s motivational sphere is the love of failure as a process.
The Thomas Edison quote about finding 10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb, Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things,” and every other “failure is good” mantra out there has you more focused on failing than succeeding.
You have been fed so much on failing that you’re congratulating yourself for every setback rather than analyzing why it was a setback in the first place.
You can just succeed. The path you’re on doesn’t have to be as monumentally difficult as it was for others. It’s extremely possible that you have the set of skills necessary to succeed in your desired area of life, without the additional struggle that some experience.
This doesn’t have to be the case. You can very well just make the smart decisions and win.
In fact, you can be so over prepared that the chance of you losing is slim to none.
Sure, failure can come, and it can hurt, and it’s good to know that it is temporary, and often with it carries a blessing in disguise. Because each failure can show us where the chinks lie in our armor.
Most athletes, for example, get much better in skill only after losses, because their weaknesses were able to be exposed.
Defeat can be good, if it only happens once. Even then, chances are what you’re doing isn’t novel, and you could’ve simply learned from the mistakes of those before you.
There is a way to be so systemic about your approach to minimize the risk of failure.
Many people champion failure because it helps ease their pain of knowing their performance is mediocre. It’s an excuse for doing crappy, lazy work.
In the startup world, there is a concept called Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This is the thinking that your product shouldn’t have to be perfect before launch, and you should release it to the market before it is ready to get feedback from the marketplace, and then iterate and make it better.
First, it was good advice. Eventually, it became an excuse for companies to take the lazy path and release crappy products.
This is what people do with failure. They mask their lack of due diligence, their lack of work ethic, and lack of focus, as being “part of the process.”
When you hear of people taking a long time to succeed, they weren’t failing at the thing they were doing. They were failing themselves.
Failing to show up. Until they finally tired of it.
This doesn’t have to be you. You know what you have to do, most of us do. It’s all the noise that stops us. It’s these self-help books that condition us to think the road is going to be long and hard. It doesn’t have to be.
The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is they get up and do what they know they are supposed to do every day. That’s it. There is no magic. There is nothing extraordinary. They just do what they are supposed to do, what we all can do, and what most don’t do.
If you’re a writer, write. Put out words every day. There is never an excuse to write zero words in a day.
If you’re an aspiring actor, put on your favorite movie scenes and reenact them with your flair and your personality. Record, analyze, and improve.
If you’re an entrepreneur, create your offer and try different ways every day of getting it out to as many people as possible.
If you’re a singer, sing.
If you’re a botanist, plant.
If you’re a YouTuber, record.
If you’re a bodybuilder, lift.
If you’re a runner, run.
If you’re a dancer, dance.
If you’re a creator, create.
Every day.
Maybe you will fail. Or maybe, you’re ready for success, if you can just accept that you are. If you can accept that maybe, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times to make a lightbulb, but chances are, you’re not inventing a lightbulb. You’re just trying to find some wins in your life, and that doesn’t have to be hard.
Just do the work.
