Use a Failure Log to Be Honest with Your Progress
I am continuing my review of Jon Acuff’s book Finish. These ideas are inspired by Chapters 2 and 7.
We’ve often used the quote “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step”. All chronic starters use this. So we take the first small step into our next breakthrough idea. We create the project on a blank sheet. We do the initial setup. But it’s usually the second step, or the step where we stumble and fall, that decides a lot.
Many people start with a clean slate and with aspirations of having a perfect record, home runs every day. They expect to score 100/100 everyday, which is the normal expectation. It is the drive of perfectionism.
But this is not real life. This is not a realistic expectation.
On a thousand mile journey, you will stumble and fall a number of times. You might even hurt yourself, you might incur an injury. But after that day of failure will you wake up the next day and continue with a fresh footing? Will you wake up and start anew, learn from the fall, and commit again? The day you start the project is not the most important day. This day when you wake up after failure and choose to continue the project, that is the most important day.
Acuff calls this, The Day after Perfect.
It is the determining factor for most people’s success or failure in a commitment. The majority of people quit after breaking their perfect streak of days. When they miss one day, they decide it is not worth continuing with a bad record, so might as well just quit.
But this is the key. You must know in advance that there will be days when you will fail. There will be days you will not hit your target. You will not have a perfect record of execution. Some days, maybe many days will be total failures. And instead of striving to be a perfectionist, you must instead, embrace these failures as part of the journey. You must note them, acknowledge them, learn quickly from them, and try again with a fresh footing the next day.
Imagine, as a child learning to walk, being so strict that you didn’t allow yourself any stumble or fall. Every step had to be perfect. You would never have learnt to walk! Imagine when you went to grade 1 in school, you could only progress to grade 2 only if you scored a perfect 100/100 in your test. You might be repeating the grade for 5 years. And you might just quit after two attempts, or even after the first failure.
There’s no benefit in delaying progress just to be perfect. And you should not quit just because it is not perfect.
One way I embrace failure is by keeping a Failure Log. This is a list of all the mistakes and failures I made for a specific project in a day. I try to note them down in a new list for every day. I review this at the end of the day and then I see how I can adjust and improve for the next day.
In addition, I’ve adopted the idea of having explicit rules for a project for the day. This is another idea that originated from trading. Once there is a list of rules, it is then easier to see at the end of the day if I broke any rule. If I did, I note that down as a failure. If I see that a rule is too limiting, I amend the rules for the next day of the project. I try to discipline myself to keep all rules.
If a rule is broken, I impose a penalty. If it is not strong enough, I amend to make it more severe to myself.
Maybe one last element I’ve found helpful is an accountability factor. Noting rules and failures in private is okay. But can you keep yourself truly accountable to yourself? I have struggled with this. So I made use of social media, using a network where I use a pseudonym so identity is not so personal. Some software developers call it Building in Public where your progress, failures, milestones, struggles, and challenges are all posted publicly. I just call it a published failure log.
For my purposes, I am only posting failures and rules, with some successes and penalties. I’ve seen that if I highlight failures every day, it is a stronger motivation for improvement. So far, in trading this technique has benefited me so I will keep using it.
These are screenshots of my Trading failure logs and rules posted on X. I try to keep similar records for other active projects.
Failures:
Rules:
Penalties:
Successes:
(In my updated PPT, I also note rewards for successful milestones).
