Failure Gives You Something Waiting Never Will

Waiting can protect you from making a mistake. It can also guarantee that you never get the feedback you need to improve.

That's the tension behind this lesson. If an important goal requires action, staying safely on the sidelines doesn't move you any closer to it. Sometimes the more useful choice is to stop waiting until you feel ready and treat the first attempt as a test instead of a final judgment on your ability.

A failed test still gives you information. You learn what worked, what didn't, and what needs to change.

That fits the same action-evaluate-adjust cycle I use throughout my systems: take a step, study the result, make an adjustment, and try again.

The key is to keep the early steps small enough that a bad result doesn't destroy the project. That's one reason I rely so heavily on small changes and small wins. A small test can fail without taking the whole goal down with it.

This also changes how you think about perfection. Progress beats perfection because real progress gives you evidence. Waiting for a perfect first move gives you theories.

And when you're working on something large, the point isn't to succeed at every step. It's to keep learning and moving until you finish. That's the same principle behind the system I use to finish what I start: break the goal down, take the next useful step, and keep adjusting instead of expecting a straight line from start to success.

In This Lesson

·        Why failure can provide information that waiting never will

·        How action, evaluation, and adjustment work together

·        Why big goals rarely follow a straight line from start to success

·        How fear of failure can become a reason never to start

·        Why treating early attempts as tests can make failure easier to tolerate

·        How reducing the size and cost of a test protects the larger goal

·        Why a failed attempt does not make you a failure

·        What a failed business taught me about separating results from identity

·        Why sometimes the fastest route to success includes failing faster

Watch the video or read the complete transcript below.

Failure Gives You Something, Waiting Never Will

(Transcript edited for clarity.)

Hi, I'm Wes. Welcome to Failure Gives You Something, Waiting Never Will. In other words, failure is better than never starting.

The main concept is that if you never start working towards whatever your goals are, then you have no hope of achieving those goals. If you do get started and you make a mistake or you fail, you still haven't reached your goal, but now you have more information. You've learned something.

You've learned something not to do. So here's the question to remember as we're going through this to help this stick in your mind: What can failure teach you that waiting can never teach you?

We often, and I think it's somewhat societal and maybe some of the ways we're raised and view success, view failure as something terribly bad.

Some things are bad. Sometimes when you fail, it is terribly bad. But sometimes failing is just a form of learning.

When you fail at something, you've learned something. You've learned, well, that doesn't work. I need to try something different.

So that's kind of the answer. But what can failure teach you that waiting will never teach you? Waiting means you don't have any chance of reaching your goal. When you get started, at least you've got a chance.

When you get started, you've got a better chance of reaching your goal than if you never start. You also will learn. You will get feedback from whatever you're doing.

So that is a learning step even if you fail. Failure creates information about what worked, what didn't work, and what you might need to change. I often talk about: you take action, then you evaluate, and then you adjust.

That's exactly what this is. You take action, even if it's a failure, even if it doesn't work or doesn't work as well as you'd like. Then you can adjust.

You evaluate why it failed. You've learned something. You adjust, and you try again.

You keep taking action. You keep evaluating, and you keep adjusting. And that's how you reach any important goal in your life.

Almost every single big goal that you ever reach in your life is going to work just like that. It's not going to be start and all roses and sunshine until you reach the goal. You're going to start.

Some things will work. Some things won't work. There'll be some failures.

You're going to learn from them, and you're going to adjust, and then try again. So instead of a straight line going from start to success, you're going to take a line that's up and down. Some things work. Some things don't. Up, down, up, down. But you keep moving up in a staggered line until you get there.

Waiting protects you from mistakes, but also prevents useful feedback. Now, this isn't everybody I work with, but some people I work with procrastinate getting started because they're so afraid to fail. And if they never start, they don't view that as a failure.

But in my mind, if I want to accomplish something, if I want to reach a big goal, if I never start, it's the same thing as failing in that neither one of them gets me to the goal. But never starting, I have no chance to get to the goal. Starting and failing the first time at least gives me feedback, which is working towards the goal.

So it's actually better to fail than to never start. Most first attempts are tests, not final judgments on your ability.

And even if your first attempt shows that you don't have the right ability, at least you learned what that ability was, so you can try to improve that ability and correct it and use it in the future, right? So it's still upside.

You've still learned. Reduce the size and cost of the first attempt so failure becomes easier to tolerate. That goes back to the test.

If you're struggling getting started, having trouble getting started because you're afraid of failure, then don't look at it as a step. Look at it as a test. Start testing things.

Okay, the first step I'm going to test is this. And the test is, it either gets you closer to your goal or it doesn't. But it doesn't speak of a failure when it's a test.

Yes, the test might not work, but it was just a test. Then you learn from that and you take another step. You need to consider the cost-benefit.

Do a cost-benefit analysis. And that's really what I was saying when I was talking about when you never start, the cost is you'll never reach the goal. So you can't possibly get the benefit of reaching the goal if you never start.

The cost of starting and failing is you might not reach the benefit immediately, and I mean the final benefit of your goal. But you still benefit from what you learned from the failure, right?

Now, when you're designing these tests or your next step and you're worried about failing, one thing I said was reduce the size and the cost of the first attempt or the first test. Design these so they don't kill you, so they don't kill the entire project or kill the entire goal.

That's why I always talk about reducing the steps to reach your goal to the smallest possible next step. You design it so it's so small that no matter what happens with this next small step, it's not going to kill you. It's not going to kill the business.

It's not going to kill the business idea. It's not going to kill the goal you're working towards. Instead, even if you fail, you learn and then you do the next thing that won't kill you, the next smallest thing possible.

Evaluate the result without turning the result into your identity. Just because you fail at a step does not mean you're a failure.

Now, sometimes you have to go through a lot of this before you build the calluses to realize that just because something you do failed, it doesn't make you a failure.

And that goes back to some of the protection questions about why some people never start. They're protecting themselves from feeling like a failure.

Well, I've started, run, worked in, etc., lots and lots of different businesses. Some of them have failed. Some of them have been wild successes.

Some of them have been okay. But in every single one of them, there have been points of failure.

I remember, though, years and years ago, I came up with a business idea. Great idea. Did the research. All ready to go.

And in my mind, I remember thinking, there's no way this can fail. Well, I've learned now that I would never say, this can't fail. Because in business, anything can fail.

It doesn't matter how good it is. There's no sure thing. Now, there are a lot of things that are surer than others, that are better. You've got a better chance than others.

But I remember, I was young. I'm like, there's no chance this won't work.

And it didn't work. And it hit me hard. That was a failure.

And I felt like a failure. But eventually, I figured out, well, it failed. It was my fault.

It was mostly my fault the thing did fail. So I realized, well, I might have failed at that, but it didn't kill me. And what's the worst that could happen?

Eventually, I got to the point where I understood that even if it failed, it didn't make me a failure.

And it didn't keep me from trying again or trying something else. That's part of what I was talking about building the calluses up. Eventually, you learn that even if you fail, if it doesn't kill you, you can learn from it.

And it might help you the next time. And then you keep going. So I can understand completely if you're afraid of failure.

Because society, maybe the way you've been raised, has taught you that failure is the worst thing ever and terrible. You might have even been taught if you fail at something that you're a failure. Well, I don't agree with that.

It's only a failure if you don't learn anything from it, or if you just completely give up.

So any big goal, any goal that's important to you, is worth the risk. It's worth the risk of failing.

And any big goal you reach, there are going to be some failures. It doesn't make you a failure.

So do whatever you have to in your mind to convince yourself that if something you're doing fails, it does not mean you're a failure.

It means you can learn something from it and then use it to go again. So get started. You're not a failure.

It just means you haven't found the right benefit to get to the success yet. You're not a failure. It just means you haven't figured out how to get to the success you want yet.

Sometimes the key is failing faster. Think of people in the sales industries. Think about insurance salesmen.

Let's say an insurance salesman has some experience and has tracked their numbers. And they know that for every 25 people they talk to, they're going to sell an insurance policy. Well, to them, the faster they can get through 24 no's, the faster they'll get to the one yes.

Now, they can try to improve that from one out of 25 to one out of 20 or one out of 15, and you should do that. But the point is, their success means they need to fail as fast as possible to get to the success.

And that's another thing: they have to know their numbers for that. They have to know that one out of every 25 or whatever.

So that's an example of failure is not always bad. Sometimes you want to fail as fast as you can in order to get to the success or the goal you want.

Please like or subscribe. This is Wes with Your Life Systems. Keep working on those systems.

What's Next?

·        Choose one important goal you've delayed because you're afraid the first attempt may fail.

·        Turn the first step into a small test rather than a final judgment.

·        Reduce the size and cost of the test so a bad result cannot destroy the larger goal.

·        Take the action, evaluate what happened, and identify what the result taught you.

·        Adjust the next step based on the evidence instead of treating the result as your identity.

·        Keep testing and adjusting until the feedback starts moving you toward the outcome you want.

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