The Paradoxical Pursuit of Failure

Hello and welcome to another episode of Words With Myself.

People commonly talk about the pursuit of success, and when people hear this they translate it to not only the pursuit of success, but the avoidance of failure. When really, failure is a prerequisite to success. You cannot have one without the other. And you should almost be pursuing failure as much as you pursue success. And people's immediate reaction to that is that it's a stupid idea.

That you don't want to fail, so why would you pursue failure and you want to succeed, so that's the thing that you should be focused on. But that's because they are framing their views of success and failure on something outcome-driven, where they are looking to force and control a specific outcome. They want victory, or they want to succeed in a certain area.

So in their mind if they only focus on aspects of success then they can avoid aspects of failure because those are the things that they don't want but in reality the two aren't too separate at all in fact in order to be successful you have to fail the only way you learn anything is by doing it wrong or making a mistake and then correcting yourself that is how you improve even it doesn't matter how talented you are, it doesn't matter how good you are,

in order to be successful and continue in that success, you must go through those states of failure. So when I'm talking about the pursuit of failure, I'm not talking about the outcome of failure. I'm not talking about you should deliberately throw things or you should mess up in your competition on purpose or you should try to get it wrong or try to lose. I'm talking about failure in a sense of the process of failing.

Where you need to make sure that you are putting yourself in situations and developing yourself in a way that failure is a natural consequence of what you're doing. If you are, even if you're successful, let's say you are a master in your domain and you are the best of the best, if you are not pursuing failure, you are not risking anything. You are just doing what you know works, but there could be other things that you could do that may take more risk, more experimentation.

There may be things that could optimize what you're doing and if you limit yourself to only what is working now, you miss out on the opportunities of how to be successful later or how to achieve even greater success and greater results. Really, failure is the lesson. That is what teaches you how to do something better.

So when you pursue failure, you're really experimenting you're seeing what works and what doesn't but you're also giving things the benefit of the doubt some things may not work immediately but with a little bit of modification or a little bit of practice might end up working after all they say a master is a student who never quit and that also means that they are forever a student they are always learning and most things that you can be a master in there is never an end anyone who has pursued

something very, very difficult, will probably know that there's never an end. You can always get better. There's always continual improvements to be made. And this means that even somebody who is a master, even somebody who is an expert in their field, they have to then actively pursue the failure. Because they've already got aspects of success. They already know how to do something successfully.

But in order to advance their knowledge or advance their understanding, they have to look at the aspects of which they are not successful or how they could introduce aspects to make it more difficult, to make it more challenging, to make them even better. If you picture in your mind, for instance, a swordsmith, And they have perfected the art of making swords. They have made so many swords that they know precisely the exact amount of hammer strikes it takes to make a perfect sword.

They know the perfect combination of metals. They know everything there is to know about making a perfect sword. But one day, somebody approaches them and they say, I have all of this metal and I want you to make me your finest sword with it. And the master readily accepts the challenge and he goes to work making a sword out of the metal that he's given. However, he finds this metal is far more brittle and constantly breaking throughout the process.

He's trying to use his hammer and it's constantly shattering the metal and destroying the sword. So the master now has two choices to make.

He either gives up on the idea and tells the customer that the metal he provided is no good it keeps shattering it's too brittle and he can't make a decent sword with it or he can do what masters do he can understand the new metal that he's been given he can understand its unique properties and why it keeps breaking so he goes back to the customer and says where did you find this metal i need more of it so the customer tells him and

he can provide more metal and gives it to the swordsmith and the swordsmith spends countless hours practicing and experimenting and trying with this new metal to make a sword that will forge and not break. He's trying different temperatures, different strengths of hammer blow, different timings, different rhythms, different cooling periods, different everything.

And he finds that he can't use the same level of heat, the same intensity of heat on this new metal as he was previously using on his iron. With this metal, he needs to slowly increase the temperature over a long period of time before it can be worked on.

And then after a long heating up period he can then work on the metal forge a sword and leave it to cool down naturally and then there is a strong sword it's not brittle it's actually even stronger than his previous swords that he was making and it wasn't that the metal was no good it wasn't that he was no good he just had to learn the process of how to work with this new metal And in life, there are so many variables.

So many changing things, that it is impossible for you to say that you know it all, even when it comes to the thing that you know the most about. There is always opportunity to learn. There is always aspects of something which will never fully be realized, not at least in one lifetime. Some things take countless years, countless lifetimes to be fully understood.

So that's why you must pursue failure because if you are not pursuing failure if you are not looking at how to make something work that doesn't currently if you're not looking at ways of success outside of what you know already works you can't truly grow you have to embrace the idea of failure it's not to pursue the outcome of failure but instead to integrate it into a natural process of success sports is a very good example of this because what typically happens is someone will

do something a particular way and they will get very successful from doing so and then what will be deemed is that everything outside of that well they're the best so anything other than what they're doing is then rubbish it's not viable. But what will happen is they'll stay at the top for a long period of time and then wham, out of the blue, somebody is gaining huge momentum, having great results by doing something unorthodox and out of the blue.

And they're getting results doing something completely different, something that breaks all of these new rules. And typically what you see is that the person that was on top for so long, they then can't adjust. They've become too stuck in their ways because they found something that worked and they practiced it over and over and over again. They got so confident in the way that it worked that they didn't want to see anything else.

They didn't want to go back to losing. They didn't want to go back to failure. They liked the idea of this constant flow of success, but it won't last. It nothing lasts. Everything is subject to change. Something that once worked will no longer work and something that didn't work may suddenly work? There are too many variables to say that this is the right way and that's the wrong way. We don't know.

All we know is that you can find what works for you and you can also find what doesn't work for you and you can spend a lot of time understanding why that doesn't work for you and why that does work for you and once you've got really good at the stuff that works for you, you can then look to improve on the stuff that doesn't work for you. You can try to integrate that into your game, because that will then enhance everything that you already do well.

But the reason people don't do this is because failure sucks. We all know this. Nobody likes failure. Nobody likes feeling like they're doing things wrong or getting things wrong or the public humiliation of being in front of a load of people and getting things wrong. But all of that is ego. And when you allow your ego to take over, you are no longer concerning yourself for success. You're concerning yourself with the outcome of success, not the process of it.

And sooner or later, if you concern yourself solely with the outcome of success, you will then lose it. You will have failure forced upon you.

Because the only way to be successful consistently is to not mind the failure, to not let it destroy you, to not let it rule your decisions or consume you, to embrace it, to allow yourself to be taught new things, to learn new things and new ways of doing things and be open to new ideas, to go through that process of getting things wrong time and time and time again. And even when you achieve success after all of that, most people the first thing that they want to do is stop.

They don't want to fail anymore. They've gone through the period of failing and they've gone through all that negative emotion. They finally achieve success and the last thing that they want to do is to even consider failure again. But you must. You must. You have to keep going through that learning process if you want to continually evolve and grow. You have to subject yourself to difficult things, things that don't work,

things that hurt, things that are painful. That is the only way you are going to grow. And if you want to stop growing, then you can avoid failure. But if you want to continuously grow, continuously improve and adapt, then you have to subject yourself to failure. And that's why I say you should pursue failure because it is as important as the successful result, the successful outcome. The failure is what teaches you everything that you need to know.

There is so much value in that failure that to avoid it or to cut it off, it almost seems ridiculous in hindsight, but we allow our egos to take over and we don't want to go through that process. We don't want to feel those feelings. We don't want to be uncomfortable. We want success. But there lies the answer to what makes the difference between someone who is successful and unsuccessful. The unsuccessful person only wants to be successful and isn't willing to be unsuccessful.

And the successful person is willing to be unsuccessful, is willing to go through that process and endure.

So if there is something that you want to do, or you're wondering how you can get better, or you're wondering how you can achieve success, ask yourself, what work am I avoiding doing? How am I so focused on success that I'm avoiding doing something that will bring it to me. Because a lot of people are so afraid of failure, are so afraid of making mistakes that they never even get started. They just say, oh, I'm no good at this. So they don't do it. There is nothing that you cannot do.

If you put the effort in, if you go through that painful process of making mistakes and getting it wrong, you can learn. And of course, some people have a natural talent towards something. And just because you don't have a natural inclination or talent towards something, that doesn't mean that you can't do it. You just have to go through that process of being bad at it, maybe even really bad at it, and maybe even for a really long time.

But if you accept that, if you accept like, I want to do this and it might be really uncomfortable I might be really bad at it and it might take me really long to get better at it or to even get good at it then you have done everything that you need to do there everything else is just show up just show up keep learning keep getting better because you have done the difficult thing that most people cannot which is accept the failure because once you've done that the success will come,

Thank you for listening.