“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”
– Thomas J. Watson

As humans, we love to win. We’re designed and taught to love winning, from the day we are born and well until the end basically.

Winning is supposedly where all the fun is, right? No one wants to be a loser or fail at something.

However, I hope this article will change how you think about failing and how it can actually guide you in the direction of your dream life.

Failing. I could talk all day about it. You know why? Because it’s a WONDERFUL thing.

Am I confusing you? Good, that would be the point of this post.

Failing is essential for you to live out your wildest dreams and is an absolute MUST when you want to achieve your goals. 

Ironically if you want to be on top, you have to get good at failing.

It’s how we evolve and grow as humans.

Still not convinced? Keep reading.. 🙂

 

 

FAILURE, REDEFINED

If you’ve read some of my other articles, you probably know by now that I like to completely eliminate the word failure from my vocabulary. And so should you.

It’s a word that in no way supports you nor your dreams and it confuses people into thinking that they ought to quit, which isn’t true at all.

In fact, the opposite is true. You need to keep going!

The word of which we no longer speak (or after you read this post at least) has truly gotten one of the worst reputations ever.

The official definition of failure (and there are several):

• To be unsuccessful in achieving a passing grade
• Stop functioning normally (excuse me?!)
• Become absent or inadequate
• To lose strength

Oh my, I’ll stop there because these definitions are totally killing my vibe right now.

So, do you get what I mean when I say worst rep ever? 

These definitions are hopeless and are actually making me squirm when I look at them.

So, let’s move on, and that quickly.

Onto the new and improved definition of failure:

• Success
• Learning
• The ability to learn from past mistakes, take a different route, sit side by side with your dreams, drinking a cup of coffee together and enjoying the view.

The last one of the above being my favorite, as you can imagine.

 

 

You’re a success!

When you think you’re failing at something, you are in fact succeeding at something.

Think about it.

Failure is part of your success and one of the stepping stones on your path to your dream life.

It’s totally necessary.

If you don’t ever fail, you won’t ever grow. 

No one (or I have yet to hear about this person) ever is that lucky that they never have to experience failure.

It’s part of the journey and we need to get good at it. 

Let’s say things didn’t go exactly as planned and you’re struggling to get back on your feet for a second trial. Great! Now you know the route you took the first time didn’t work out.

You get up, try again and apply different strategies this time.

 

 

Fail, Learn, Achieve

All you’re really doing when you think you fail is learning. That is it.

You put yourself out there, try something new, something you’ve never done before, and you didn’t succeed.

Congratulations! You’ve just earned a knowledge badge of which you can apply the second time you try. 

It’s important not to slouch back into your couch, but to get up and USE what you’ve learned to improve your route, your strategies and implement them.

The more you fail and put yourself out there, the more you will succeed and the stronger you will be as a person.

Fail, learn and repeat.

And eventually, you will achieve your goals and have the results you want in your life.

You are also more likely to achieve the mini-goals along the way because you are constantly learning, experiencing little wins here and there, if you think about your dips as wins rather than misses.

It’s all about how you think about the situation, more on this in the next paragraph.

 

 

Failure Means Nothing

How do you look at fear?

Your mind plays the lead character in your life.

How you look at things, you will perceive things to be.

Your perception and how you think about fear is key to overpowering it. 

If you see failure, you will see failure. If you see opportunities, opportunities appear.

It’s as simple as that.

Think about how you feel when you assume you’ve failed.

You may feel depleted, hopeless, unfortunate, disappointed and sad.

The worst feeling in the world, I may add, and we don‘t want any of that in here. 

Mastering your own mindset is a crucial step to be able to go head to head with fear and rise above it.

Pay close attention to your thoughts and try switching your mindset around to for example:

• Ok, this didn’t go exactly as planned, but man am I going to get back up and try again.
• I’m not failing, I am constantly learning and it will take me to where I need to go in order to achieve my #1 goal in life.

This is the most important takeaway from this article. If you master your mind, you can think and believe anything. 

Also, do not, under no circumstances, let failure mean ANYTHING about who you are as a person.

Failure is only a circumstance and it is your thoughts about it that is affecting you.

Start with your mind and see failing for what it really is, which is learning. 

Failure means squat!

 

 

Show No Fear & Take action

Don’t give into fear.

Show no mercy and don’t let it take up any of your precious time on this earth.

If you fear failure, it will stop you from taking action.

Not taking action won’t get you anywhere and your dreams will start to slowly fade away (I’m trying to paint quite the picture here).

The fear starts and stops with your brain.

Its only job in this life is to protect you and when it sees fear it will convince you to stay put, stand still and take no action what so ever.

You’ve set amazing goals for yourself and your brain fears the unknown. This is a problem. In order to move forward and get closer to your amazing goals, experiencing failure and getting past your fear is crucial.

When your brain notices that you’ve tried and failed at something before, it’s going to take some convincing your mind to put yourself out there again.

There’s a learning curve to mastering your mind.

Start slow, put yourself out there, feel the fear and do it anyway.

Soon enough, your brain will catch up with you. It will always play catch-up, not the other way around, so you need to be the leader and make the decision to take action in spite of fear. 

When you cross paths with fear, it does in no way mean that you should stop.

 

 

Keep Going

Try, resume, repeat.

Try, resume and repeat.

This is how this story will go.

Life is unpredictable and the perfect destination doesn’t exist. It just doesn’t.

There will always be negativity (because without it there would be no positivity, we need that contrast, y’all), problems occur and things happen that are entirely out of our hands.

 

 

BEFORE YOU GO

To sum up:

• Ultimately, a so-called failure is the key to your success
• Set big aspiring goals
• Be solution-oriented
• Work that mindset of yours
• And KEEP GOING