Treat Failure Like a NASA Scientist

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to go to San Francisco and work with Alex Mehr — a world renowned serial entrepreneur and former NASA scientist that has launched over 30 products/companies that have done over $1 Billion in revenue…

So how does a Alex treat failure? And how can we adapt his approach to our own life?

I booked my ticket and after 18 hours of travel from Melbourne, Australia to San Fransisco I arrived at the Mentorbox headquarters to attend their monthly roundtable event — and by chance — I ended up staying the week to learn from my mentors in person. Rather than reading a book — I absorbed their mindset by being around them — by observing their emotional states and their mental toughness. It’s a process Tai Lopez calls osmosis, a face to face interaction enabling us to learn more in 5 days than you would learn in 10 years on your own.

Here is what Alex Mehr and Jonathan Kendall taught me…

Experiment Like a Scientist

Immediately upon arriving at Mentorbox Alex put me to the assignment of setting up an online store with Click Funnels, and assigned my friend Sean to set up a store through Shopify. It didn’t matter if the experiment failed — it was about the data collected, and the process.

That’s the difference between a scientist and us.

A scientist views everything as an experiment, and it’s all about the data collected.

This is a contrarian view of how society views failure. For most of us, failure is an indication of who we are as a person. We fail, so therefore we’re a bad person.

Failing to run a successful business means we’re a bad business-person.

Failing to to lose weight means we’re not trying hard enough. Failing at a test means your not smart enough, and so on.

But for the scientist and business magnate Alex Mehr, failing is more important than succeeding. In fact, failure gives us more feedback on what we are doing than success. It gives us the data that’s required to improve.

How do we stop ourselves from being scared of failure?

Be Confident and Be Humble

Over dinner, in a small San Franciscan pizza diner — Jonathan Kendall, the COO of Mentorbox said it best: “Be confident and be humble.” We all need to be confident in our efforts to succeed. We all start out being naively confident, but as we get older we take less risks, grow scared of failure and become comfortable with how things are — not how they could be.
Fear of failure is the the biggest dream killer.

Our goal is to treat failure like Alex and Jonathan. Your experiments may fail, but you are not the failure. Your experiments could succeed but you’re not the success. We are not only seeking the benefits and the results — rather, the knowledge and the data points.

Practice detachment from the outcome.

If you’re focused on mastering a craft, starting a new business, or developing a new habit you’re basically experimenting one way or another.

And if you run many experiments you’re going to fail along the way but failure doesn’t define who we are. Our values define who we are.It’s through this process we improve upon on our experiments and when version 2.0 comes out we are given another chance to improve, succeed and make an impact. Let’s fall in love with the process and be open for improvement.

Originally published at www.sambarry.com on December 21, 2018.