Do you keep putting off that dream project because you don’t believe you’ll ever succeed?
Have you always wanted to be your own boss but never dared to quit your current job?
In other words, are you afraid to fail?
Here’s why you should do the exact opposite and actually seek failure in your life.
As much as it goes against our nature, we need to get comfortable with failure, he explains.
Even more so, we need to seek failure, as “failure is where all of the lessons are”.
Successful people fail more than they succeed
He clarifies his approach with the following example: “You know, when you go to the gym and you work out, you’re actually seeking failure, you want to take your muscles to the point where you get to failure, because that’s where the adaptation is, that’s where growth is.
Successful people fail a lot, they fail a whole lot more than they succeed, but they extract the lessons from the failure and they use the energy and they use the wisdom to come around to the next phase of success.”
That’s right, the most successful people are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most. The greatest masters of classical music like Beethoven or Mozart have generated hundreds of compositions while coming up with a much smaller number of masterpieces. Check this article if you want to know the three habits that successful people have in common!
Fail early, fail often and fail forward
So go for it, take a shot!
As Will Smith rightly puts it: “You have to live at the edge of your capabilities. You gotta live where you’re almost certain you’re going to fail.”
And don’t worry, you’ll get better with every shot you take:
“Practice is controlled failure, you’re getting to your limit (…) You can’t live that, you can’t do that, until you get to the point that all of a sudden your body makes the adjustment and then you can do it.”
By jumping into it and practicing to fail, you’ll get better at recognizing the areas where you need to improve.
So keep Will Smith’s mantra in mind for your future projects: “Fail early, fail often, fail forward”!