They’ve been lying to you, lady.
That’s right. You’ve been striving for excellence, shooting for that 4.0 GPA, you’re in it to win it – yet all along, what you should have been doing is failing more often and more creatively. But that isn’t what they’ve been telling you, is it? They’ve been telling you that if you really want something, you can get it, do it, have it, be it. As if the wanting is the key.
The problem isn’t that you don’t want to achieve your goal. The problem is that you’re quitting when you should be failing.
There are very few champions of failure out there. But think about it. You have to be at least willing to fail in order to try anything. If you aren’t willing to fail, to mess up, to be a complete flop, you’re going to spend a lot of time avoiding the things you dream of.
So that brings us to the part of goal achievement where you have to take action and you have to be all in for some failure of heroic proportions.
Quitting is not a heroic failure.
The difference between quitting and failing is that quitting happens early, leaves you feeling terrible and doesn’t contain the possibility of success. Failure happens after you’ve taken action, and… doesn’t have to feel all that bad.
For example, deciding not to apply for a job you want because you don’t think you’ll get it? That’s a quit. Applying for it and then not getting it? That’s a fail and it might have been a win. Quitting never gives you a chance to win. Failing contains the potential for a win and teaches you how not to do something.
So for the coming week…
Figure out what action you can take toward your goal, confront your fear of failure and just go ahead and take one big action. Then decide on your next big action.
If you’ve been playing along with this series of posts you have:
- Set a big goal, refusing to believe that your past determines your future.
- Figured out that your brain is going to want you to quit – and while that’s normal, it’s not helpful.
- Started to plan ahead and focus a lot of attention on working toward your goal to build habits and synapses.
- Scrutinized how your brain is messing with your plan and tried different ways of planning.
- Learned that a quit is not a fail, and failure is what you want to have more of- and you’re going to plan on it.
Next week:
How to analyze your quits and trick your brain into rejecting them.