Failing Forward! How To Succeed And Fail Your Way To Success.
By Miles Beckler
What if you learned today that you could fail your way to success?
That would be a powerful mindset shift, right?
It would make all of the mistakes you’ve made up until now seem like GOOD things – because in truth, they ARE.
That’s the kind of mindset that will lead you to financial freedom in the long run.
What’s your mindset, you might ask?
Basically, your mindset is the sum of the attitudes, stories, and beliefs you have about the world… and one of the most important mindsets towards your eventual success or failure is how you THINK about success and failure, for example – do you view failure as a bad thing? Or a good thing?
You might think that’s a ridiculous question and say – “hey, of course failure is bad… I want to succeed!”
Your mindset might be: “OK, I want to be successful. So that means I need to avoid doing “failure activities” and instead make sure I’m doing “success activities”.
Then you keep searching for the “right system” or the “right business model” or the “right niche” that’s going to lead you to success… and you never leave research mode! I used to do the same thing – but that mindset didn’t take me anywhere.
It certainly didn’t take me to my current levels of success, it required personal development and really looking at the psychology of success in order to shift my mindset to one that was empowering me to attract the results and lifestyle I desired.
The mindset that WILL make you successful is one of failing forward, or failing your way to success.
This is a more accurate and empowering mindset that you achieve by developing personally focuses on doing and execution rather than researching, and trust yourself that you’ll learn A LOT more by trying and failing than you will by reading and researching and listening to podcasts.
Why? Because there are different types of knowledge… and intellectual knowledge (knowledge you get from research) is just one kind.
Another type of knowledge, experiential knowledge, comes from actually trying things in the real world and learning by doing, often times this powerful knowledge comes from trial and error, and this type of knowledge is very powerful.
If you can combine these two types of learning (with a heavy focus on the doing/experiential knowledge) you’ll find that nothing can stop you on your journey to success.
Just remember: when you fail, you learn. And when you learn, you get better. This is the secret to success!
If you would like to watch this video, here is the link:
That’s why Carlos Gracie, an incredibly successful Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, said: “There is no losing in jiu-jitsu. Either you win or you learn.”
There are a couple of key resources beyond this blog that might be useful towards shifting your mindset towards, “I’m going to fail my way to success”, one is the book “Mindset” by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck
In it, she shows that everything in life is a skill, and when you have an open mindset about getting better (especially through doing), you CAN change your life for the better.
Another is the book “Go For No”. This one really helped me make the shift from being a researcher to being a doer. A final book that will be really useful for you is “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. This is an extremely powerful book that will change your life for the better if you apply the lessons within it.
