FAIL
Live your life with failure rather than regret.
-Unknown
I saved the toughest for last. Society has taught us that failure is bad. We were taught at an early age, through school, that failure is not acceptable. I know it’s tough to imagine, but yet another L for our education system.
Unfortunately, in adulthood, failure is what puts you above the rest. Failure leads to growth. It leads to success. It leads to a fulfilled life. Now everyone is trying to figure out how to overcome the fear of failure. Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer, as I am still finding myself in situations where I let the fear of failure get the best of me. But, what if I told you there was science to prove that learning to fail will propel you to the next level?
The Science of Failure
Everyone loves science-backed evidence, and that’s exactly what I found after listening to another podcast from Dr. Huberman, a neuroscientist from Stanford University. In the podcast, he talks about what the key to plasticity is. Remember: plasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt and create habits. Dr. Huberman says that the “key to plasticity is making errors.” By making errors, we cause our brain’s plasticity to heat up in a sense.
Think of a plastic gallon of water baking under the sun; once it reaches a certain temperature, then the plastic becomes very malleable and is easy to change its shape. The same thing happens to the brain through failure and error. Instead of getting heat from the sun, the brain gets heat for malleability through repetition and errors.
Dr. Huberman suggests that when you are doing something that you aren’t familiar with, which causes you to make errors, “keep making errors for seven to thirty minutes. This will signal chemicals in your brain that neuroplasticity needs to happen in order for you to stop making the same error and highlights the neural pathway for change.”
So in order to get better at something, making mistakes will actually speed up your learning process.
The Worst Failure
The worst failure you can make is not trying to make any failures. If you think back to some of the most complex things you learned, the quickest way to learning was through error. When people say “think outside the box,” that’s a skill that is developed through error. When you are comfortable with failure/error, you come into a situation where people have only been thinking about the problem from a book’s perspective. You have the audacity to try things that weren’t in their book. You aren’t afraid of trying something that isn’t normal.
We have been failing since we were born. Think about how many times we had to fail to learn how to walk! There would be no miracle of a human being if our species didn’t persist after their first failure with walking. There is no future propelling of humans without failure. From a society standpoint, we got to where we are today because people were persistent with their failures. The elite knows that failure is the only way to get to where they want to go.
Side Note: If you want to go for it, do it, but don’t continue to have excuses for why you aren’t getting to where you want to go. There’s always a road. The worst thing you can do is to continue to beat yourself up and keep regurgitating excuses. It’s better to just come to terms with who you really are as a person and admit that you don’t have the drive or passion there to pursue whatever it is you are trying to achieve. If you wanted it bad enough, you would be finding a mode of transportation to go down the road.
Fast World, Short Attention
With such a fast-moving world, you can feel a little at ease with failure because there is always something new and shiny within a matter of 24 hours, if not seconds. There is always going to be someone failing, to which people love to turn their attention. The mass majority of news is addicted to pessimism; it gets the most attention.
Two Sides of Failure
Failure is a choice you have to make. Like I previously mentioned, you have to choose your struggles. You have the ability to completely erase the phrase fear of failure just by doing nothing and going into complete solitude; being at peace with doing absolutely nothing. Or you can get your dopamines firing at extreme levels and try to advance the human species to places that were previously thought impossible. Both sides of the spectrum are admirable. Both sides require extreme action. You can also go in spurts where you refrain from failure and then decide to take massive action on a project and cannonball into a pool of failure.
The one place you don’t want to be is in the middle. You are constantly worried about failure in the middle, letting the fear of failure consume your conscious thoughts. It refrains you from putting out your gifts into the world. You don’t meet the type of people you want to because of it. Meddling in the middle is the worst place to be and a spot where you truly have failed. Failed to live life.
When You’re In The Right Business, There Is No Such Thing As Failure
When your business is making money, there is always going to be a fear of failure. But, when your business is helping other people, there is no such thing. If I were writing this book just for money, I would be attached to the fear of making money. But, since I am writing this book because I firmly believe it can help someone, I don’t feel any fear.
The truth is someone is always going to know more than you, but you know more than someone else. That is why it’s critical to overcome the fear of failure because someone needs to hear what you have to say. So give your gift to the world!
Read:
Fail Fast, Fail Often: How Losing Can Help You Win by Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz
THE SHORT GUIDE TO 30