GAIN MORE SUCCESS
LOSE MORE TO WIN MORE
3 Ways To Increase Your Failure Rate In Order
To Toughen Up And Gain More Success
Fail more! Fail fast! Fail better!
These phrases are spouted
endlessly these days but there’s
one giant thing missing from the
conversation: How. After all, we
grew up thinking that less failure equals
more success, right? And now here’s the
world suddenly telling us to fail more.
In my research on resilience for my new
book You Are Awesome: How to Navigate
Change, Wrestle With Failure, and Live an
Intentional Life I came across three specific
tactics to thoughtfully achieve the “fail
fast!” mantra.
Today I’m going to lay out these three ways
to help accelerate your failure rate and
therefore quicken your ability to suss out
whether you’re on the right path, when you
should turn the other way, and where you
should double down.
1. GO TO PARTIES (WHERE YOU
DON’T KNOW ANYONE)
Success blocks future success.
Say you get good at one thing and your
brain, like my brain, wants to keep chasing
that bunny. You struck oil? Pay dirt! You’re
onto something good. The problem is
that when you start making it and raking
it, you’re also missing out on all the other
options, all the other efforts, all the other
potential flops that might have led you to
even greater success, however you define it.
Say you get into real estate in your twenties,
you sell a few condos, you feel like you’re
really onto something. Great! But that also
means you’re going to play the real estate
game and maybe never fully realize that
had you not quit ballet in your twenties,
you might be on Broadway right now.
Success blocks future success. The issue
here is that when you’re good at one thing,
the world conspires to keep you there. To
make you stay in your lane. To make you
stick to your specialty. That’s nobody’s
fault. To move through this volatile,
chaotic, and ambiguous and complicated
world, we all need mental labels to filter
and sort all the people in our lives. “You’re
my real estate agent friend!” your friends
think. So when you chat with them at
birthday parties, it’s about the market and
interest rates and when they should sell.
All those endless conversations serve to
deepen your knowledge in that one area,
make you more successful in this one area,
and then crystallize your identity even
further, making it harder and harder and
harder to mentally break out, explore new
ground, and try new things.
What’s the solution? Go to parties. Where
you don’t know anyone.
Accept an invite to an event far away, hit
a reading by an author you’ve never heard
of, grab a ticket to a concert in a genre you
never listen to, grab a cocktail at the hotel
bar after your flight, attend the online
meetup for an old passion you forgot you
had—and, of course, go to parties.
Will it be awkward? Uncomfortable?
Sometimes. Sometimes, sure. You might
not meet anyone. You could have three
superficial chats and connect with precisely
nobody. You may leave feeling as though
you just wasted your time. That’s the risk.
That’s the downside. That’s the potential
for failure.
But what’s the potential gain? The
potential gain is that you’ll meet
interesting people in interesting places.
The potential gain is that you’ll drift into
other lanes, go down new thinking paths,
and you’ll slowly unfurl yourself from
whatever mental sleeping bags you’re
rolled up in.
And maybe your experience will provoke
and prompt new ideas, new efforts, new
risks, and new ventures that you’ll fail at
and learn from.
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