Conquering Failure

I speak to a lot of people who have great ideas and want to start businesses. The number one thing they ask me about is failure. “What if I fail?” is a common question. Personally, my attitude is “so what?” but I know not everyone has the same attitude. I’ve written a few points below on how I contextualize and overcome failure.

1. Fear Setting

Tim Ferriss has a process called fear setting. You ask yourself ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ Will your life be ruined if you don’t succeed? Probably not. Create a mental worst case scenario and get comfortable with it. Once you have no fear of the worst, you’ll be able to worry less and focus on optimizing your outcome, and you’ll be less likely to fail in the first place.

2. Failure Is Not The Lack Of Success

A mentor once told me that the only way you can truly fail is by acting unethically, breaking the law, or giving up. Everything else is a lesson, and not failure. I’ve been impatient about reaching my goals. I took the view that since I hadn’t succeeded, I was a failure. I was confusing failure with a lack of success. Remember, just because you haven’t achieved your goals yet, doesn’t mean your a failure. Anything worth doing takes time, but it will take less time if you’re not beating yourself up.

3. Weakness To Strength

By any metric, I am a failure as a Congressional staffer (one job offer for 70 applications). I don’t lose sleep over it. I love telling this story because it shows how I persevered when I was facing overwhelming rejection. I’m willing to bet any story of personal or professional failure has a silver lining that makes you look even more impressive. Embrace your own ups and downs and use your whole story to achieve success in the future.

4. Ease Up

You’re going to fail. Probably not in a way that ruins your life, but you won’t always reach your goals. That’s ok. Don’t punish yourself, and don’t let a past failure dictate your future. There are a million factors that go into any business, and most of them are external to your control. Work as hard as you can on the things you can change, and if your business fails due to something beyond your reach, know that it’s not your fault.

5. Fall Seven, Rise Eight

The most important question related to failure is ‘what do you do next?’ There is a Japanese saying that goes “fall seven, rise eight.” You don’t have to fail the least, you just have to get up one more time than the competition. It can be discouragingI like to look at my time as an investment. If I give up short of my goal, all the time I’ve invested to reach my objective goes out the window. I personally hate wasting time, so that’s an even worse outcome than persistent failure. After I go through that thought process, I get back on track and keep working.