There is one thing you can be completely sure of: YOU WILL FAIL.
No matter how hard you try. Some day you will fail. That’s a fact and you have to face it!
But don’t be sad – there is also going to be a day when you succeed if you have the courage to face failure.
In my life failure and success have played a big role. I managed to build up a considerable degree of willpower, but I almost fucked up my health due to my compulsion to succeed. In my second year of university, I compulsively wanted to succeed at the exams, while I had way too many hobbies and was organising my semester abroad. My compulsion lead to food allergies and an incredible amount of stress that took me almost two years to cure. Had I accepted the possibility of my own failure, I could have taken it more relaxed, I might have dropped some hobbies and I might have still passed the exams.
I will give you two other examples in which you can see what an impact acceptance of failure can have.
The archetypical example for accepting failure is building a start-up. You will never know if you succeed. If you are compulsive about your success and will not allow yourself to fail, you will have a hard time growing your start-up and if you were to fail, you might not have the courage to start over again with another start-up.
As a second example, say you are addicted to cigarettes (or it could also be to your smartphone or any bad habit). If you are compulsive about your success in quitting smoking, you might still be able to quit. But if you fail only once and smoke one cigarette you might believe you failed the whole challenge and get addicted again. Yet, if you accept your own failure and just start over again, this one faux pas will not hinder you from quitting the drug, but you can view it as part of the process.
It is important to face the fact that you will fail at some things in life. Sometimes you will fail at big things, other times at small things. It doesn’t matter how small or big your failure is, you will ultimately have to confront yourself with failure.
Succeeding is a natural consequence of having the courage to accept failure. Learning to accept failure is an ongoing process, which is going to make you feel free. Free of your perpetual need to succeed, not allowing yourself to fail.
But be aware that you cannot fake acceptance of failure! You have to face it, confront it and feel the pain inside yourself when you think about failing.
A major obstacle on the path to success is compulsion. It is what puts you into a mental prison. You buy into the myth that you are more likely to succeed if you compulsively convince yourself that you will succeed.
To a certain extent, compulsion makes you succeed. It will help you gain confidence and willpower to achieve your goals. However, inevitably, some day you will fail. Working compulsively towards your goal will not free you from feeling and experiencing failure. When you push and reach your limits, when you get stronger, you will ultimately also experience failure.
Failure is natural and it helps you. Failure is your friend. Learn to appreciate it!
It is what makes you learn and grow. It makes you reconsider your path. It makes you doubt yourself and rethink what you are doing. Maybe you even change your path. Or you realise how you have to change your behaviour to get ahead on the same path. Maybe you just realise that you have to try again with a stronger intention. In any case: u will learn a lot from your failure, so appreciate it!
Working compulsively towards your goals with a deeply rooted need to succeed is like walking on thin glass. When you eventually fail, the glass will break and all the success and achievements will feel useless because of the newly experienced dreadful failure! This failure will break your confidence.
It is going to be much harder for you to start over again because now the fear of failing has grown stronger. Yet, the reason why failure hits you so hard is the compulsion you experience. The compulsion to succeed and the fear of failure.
There is a simple, yet intense step to overcome compulsion. Confront yourself with the fact that you could possibly fail at the very first moment you start a new undertaking. Every time you face a challenge there is a valid possibility that you will fail. If you confront yourself and feel the fear inside yourself, you can start to let go of the compulsive need to succeed and start accepting that you could fail. There is no success that doesn’t come along with some sort of failure. In the end, failure will help you to be more successful than if you were compulsively trying to succeed. You can take more risks, you can think more freely because you are not compulsively holding onto your success, but see it as an ongoing process of success, failure and learning.
As mentioned before, don’t try to fake it. You have to find peace with the thought of you failing in that specific challenge and then do the best you can to succeed!
I believe that a lot of western society is built on the assumption that you must work hard and succeed. Being successful is one of the most important aspects people measure the worth of their life with. This, by itself, creates a compulsion to succeed. If you don’t succeed how much of a worth does your life have? How good are you performing at the “game of life”?
The more you succeed and the better you perform at the “game of life”, the more you allow yourself to feel happy. You can compare yourself with others and if you see that you do better than them you feel awesome! You outperformed them! This ultimately leads to the compulsion to succeed and the fear of failure. Because if you fail, how good do you perform at the “game of life”? Pretty badly! So you better never fail or even if you do, better try to hide it so no one will ever know.
This is how I feel failure and success are treated in our western society. We are all running like a hamster in a wheel. We hurry up to get somewhere, to be someone, to perform well, but we don’t really get a handle on ourselves. We don’t love ourselves, we love our success (if there is any).
I am not a fan of sitting on my fat ass and watching Netflix all day and night. I like to challenge myself and be successful. I love to get more skilled and to perform better at the “game of life”. But I try to do it for the love of change, for the sake of experience, rather than success. Failure is as much an experience as success is. Yet, we fear failure way more than success. It’s usually when I failed, when I felt like I’m getting ahead the most, I’m learning the most and I’m experiencing the most.
This topic goes even deeper into my life philosophy. The main reason we fear failure is the fact that we want to control our lives. We want certainty! We want life to be predictable and we want it to work the way we intended it to work. Acceptance of failure is accepting the fact that life is not perfect and not predictable. Also, it touches on the fact that we can’t possibly know what will be best for us in the long run. As we cannot predict life, we cannot know future challenges we are going to face. Failing in a challenge today can help you gain knowledge, which will help you succeed in a future challenge. Or it might make you reconsider the path you’re walking in life and start going into another direction. Or it could simply tell you: “If you want to achieve this one thing, get stronger and try again! Don’t give up!”.
Failure is often not what we want. It is what we need.
This blog is my way to confront myself with the possibility of failure. There is a chance that no one cares about what I have to say, or people might even be offended. Also, I am showing myself vulnerable, because I share my thoughts and feelings about life and people can comment on it.
Yet, I feel it is the right moment to start my blog and share my thoughts. And it feels right to start it with this very article about failure.
I hope some people will get inspired by my words and I will be very open for feedback, suggestions and other forms of interaction.
Jonas