We hear about these amazing success stories all the time. There are these inspiring rags to riches stories about people who grew up with nothing and now they’re jet-setting millionaires, living their best life. Of course we all want to achieve a similar kind of success. Of course success is desirable. But what about failure? Do you want to fail? Are you prepared for it?
The Truth About Failure
There are two very obvious “facts” about failure that I think all of us recognize on an intuitive level, but we don’t always fully internalize. First, it’s obvious enough that success, in general, is more desirable than failure. You’d much rather enter a marathon race and win than to enter the same marathon and come in last place. I think that’s pretty obvious.
Second, many of us should recognize that the path to success is not always perfectly straight. It’s not a linear journey that naturally builds upon itself, where you are literally putting one foot in front of the other and taking it one step at a time. You don’t always keep moving forward, because you will inevitably face setbacks and obstacles and delays. Most of understand this intuitively, but we don’t always allow yourselves to take on this perspective in reality.
I don’t know about you, but I can get really down on myself with things don’t exactly go my way. I might start out with an unbridled sense of enthusiasm about a project or an endeavor, and I might really give it my all. But if the numbers that come back are disappointingly low, that can be awfully depressing. The failure makes me FEEL like a failure. But I pick myself up, dust myself off, and give it another go.
Let’s Get to the Point
The point of this post isn’t to remind that failure, as opposed to success, is generally undesirable. Yes, I know that the path to success is riddled with failures and each of these failures can act as a learning opportunity. Each time you fall flat, you’ve learned another way that didn’t work, so you pick yourself up and try something a little different to see if it works out any better. That’s how children learn to walk. And that’s you learn to do whatever it is that you want to do better.
Instead, the real point of this post is really just a simple reminder. You must be willing to fail, regardless of what it is that you want to do. Whether you want to start a new blog, publish an ebook, launch a membership site, start an affiliate marketing campaign or whatever else… recognize that failure is always a very real possibility, whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been at this for several years and *think* you know what you’re doing.
Because an unwillingness to fail is an unwillingness to succeed.
Embrace the Suck
You need to be willing to fail over and over and over again in order to achieve any real form of success. If you are too scared to try something new, if you are too afraid of the possibility of failure, then you will never be willing to go as far as you need to go or take the lengths that you need to take to achieve “success,” however you choose to define it.
If you are unwilling to fail, you will always stick with what is safe and predictable. You will stay within the calming confines of your comfort zone, too afraid to dip even your toes into unknown waters. You can’t know if you can ride a bike until you hop on that seat and start pedaling. You can’t know if you are able to swim until you jump into the water.
Yes, you might fall over and scrape your knee. You might end up swallowing a little bit of water. In fact, you probably will and that’s okay. If anything, it’s to be expected. Failure is inevitable. And the sooner you can accept that, the sooner you’ll be prepared for the possibility of success to come.