“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas Edison
Fail often to succeed faster. Failing is just finding out what doesn’t work. The faster you fail—eliminate what doesn’t work—the sooner you’ll find what does and achieve your success.
You shouldn’t be concerned about failing. It’s not a bad thing, but simply a natural effect of doing something. After all, we all suck at first when we start. If you’re not afraid of failure, then you keep trying, finding out what doesn’t work and honing in on what does. You get better sooner and succeed faster.
What Matters Is the Result, Not the Process
It’s all about results, not the process. Who cares how you look like when you learn? People only care about your product, not how you looked like developing it. What matters is you reaping the rewards of achieving something, not how you got there.
When you learned to ride a bike, you probably used training wheels, then wobbled when you took them off. At first, you fell. However, the quicker you kept trying and falling the faster you got better. After a while, you got the hang of it. Now you don’t even think about it; what matters to you is that you can ride a bike. Others don’t care as well; they only care that you can ride with them.
You start something. You suck at first. But the more you fail the faster you succeed.
I Failed Often and Succeeded Faster
During my last two years in college, I learned a lot about entrepreneurship: starting a business, delivering value, making a profit, passive income. All I did was read and go to seminars, though. I had a few ideas but was afraid of failing if I tried to execute them.
After I graduated, I started an online business with a friend. I decided to just do it. Our website wasn’t awesome at first, but we kept trying new things. And what happened was the website got a lot better – fast.
And guess what? I learned more about creating a profitable and value-giving business in two months than those last two years in college. I tried a lot, failed often, figured out what doesn’t work, and honed in on what does. I got results a lot faster than I expected – more content, more traffic, more money. After a few more months, we had a finely-tuned website chugging along, and my knowledge of entrepreneurship skyrocketed.
The Opposite of Success Isn’t Failure, It’s Giving Up
What are you trying to achieve? Do you feel it’s taking too long? Are you afraid of failing? Don’t be. Failing isn’t bad, it’s a natural effect of doing something new. We all suck at first.
The only thing that matters is results, not the process. Failure is just finding out what doesn’t work. So get out there and start failing. Try things. Quickly find out what doesn’t work to get to what does. Fail often to succeed faster.
And remember: The opposite of success isn’t failure. Failing is just finding out what doesn’t work. The opposite of success is giving up.
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” -Michael Jordan
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(Image: You Higuri)
6 Comments
Great work Oleg!
It is one of those counter intuitive lessons in life that most people fail to learn. I am glad you have learned yours. The thing that resonates with me the most is that the opposite of success if giving up and not failure – it is crucial!
Yet, there are so many reasons why people are not fond of failing, even with a prospect of eventual success. Let us look at couple of them: 1)People are not educated about dealing with failure 2) People are surrounded by peers with a “victim ” mentality 3) People do not learn from their failures 4)People form a habit of failing
I would to go more in depth analyzing each of those points, but to keep it short – it comes down to awareness of the situation. It comes down to the ability of detaching yourself from the situation and looking at it from the outsider’s point of view. However, developing that skill is series of failures that are worthy enough of eventual success.
Keep writing!
Best,
Tomas
I would love to go in depth in each o
Thanks for your great comment Tom. Always a pleasure.
You hit the nail on the head with your point #1. Society conditions most people to achieve “success” (whatever that means) while not making mistakes. If anything, failures are punished – with bad grades, scolding, etc. People either don’t know how to deal with failures as a method of faster growing, and if anything, they become afraid of it.
Keep writing too, Tom. I’m liking what I’m reading so far
Best,
Oleg
I have always been enthusiastic about “failing,” or in other words, not succeeding, because I know that I am one step closer to an achievement. When you take an introspective journey through your own life and act in a transparent nature for yourself, everyone will realize that they have made more mistakes in their lives than anything else. I consider life like a puzzle, where all of your millions of experiences represent pieces to this puzzle, without each experience your puzzle of life would not be complete. Therefore, the only failure is the one where you don’t bounce back….Fall down 7 times and get up 8!!!
Hey Jared, thanks so much for reading and leaving your comment. I agree with you – as long as you’re failing with a purpose and direction, all a failure means is you’re one step closer to an achievement. I like your puzzle analogy too: interesting to visualize.
Keep bouncing back,
Oleg
Oleg,
Couldn’t agree with you more on this post, and your general outlook. College courses weren’t my cup of tea either. Instead I studied abroad and sold real estate as an upperclassman. Learning through failing is by far the quickest way to success. People learn by doing and nothing else is more powerful. You can interview every pro quarterback about how they did it, but that won’t make you half as good of a quarterback if you had simply tried throwing a football.
It’s ironic that I stumbled across this post because I just wrote one yesterday about “failing forward” which is practically the same concept, that will be a guest post on a top 100k alexa blog within my first week of starting my personal finance blog. Without having the mentality that you mention and overcoming the elusive and pointless “fear” I would not have contacted the blogger and asked to post.
Like the blog and what you’ve got going here.
Ryan
Thanks for reading and your awesome comment Ryan. Agreed – the best way to get better at something is to just do it. A lot. Constantly. Like your quarterback example.
Awesome about the synchronicity of our articles, and congrats on the guest post on the 100k Alexa blog man. You rock for just doing it without fear.
Great having you here and keep rocking it,
Oleg