Why Failing Leads To Success

[00:00:00] So you could even say that the amount of success you have is proportionate to the amount of failures you've had. [00:00:07] In this session, we're going to discuss why failing leads to success and the growth mindset. This is one of the most essential, most important things you will ever hear in your life. What I'm about to share with you has changed my entire life to. To be perfectly honest, this one idea, I didn't realize how stuck I was until I understood this. And it really opened up so many things in my life. [00:00:38] So let's dive into this. [00:00:40] The first thing we need to understand is that there are two mindsets. [00:00:47] This is from a book, Mindset by Carol Dweck, which is a solid book. I highly, highly, highly recommend you read that book. Read it multiple times. [00:00:56] Called Mindset and what she discovered with studying various people and also children is that there are two main mindsets. One is called the fixed mindset and the other is called the growth mindset. The fixed mindset is where somebody believes that their intelligence or their level of skill is predetermined at birth. [00:01:23] In other words, somebody is either a creative type person or they're not. They're either intelligent and good at math or they're not. They're either good at playing basketball or they're not. They're either good at, you know, wearing the best clothes and figuring out the best fashion, or they're not. Right? So what happens is that when we're children, if our parents say things like, oh, you're a natural, you're so good at that, you know, you're that sort of person. Or if a teacher says you're not that kind of person, you're not good at math, you're not that, right. So you're basically being labeled as either good at something or not good at something. You're either a natural or you're not a natural. The fixed mindset is that we have these innate skills and tendencies and there's nothing we can do about them. So you're either a musical person or you're not a musical person. You're either an artistic person or you're not. You're either an analytical, science based person or you're not. [00:02:25] Now, of course, we all have natural inclinations and tendencies. So some people are more creative, generally speaking. Some people are more organized. But we all have the potential in us to improve anything. But the fixed mindset puts people in a box. And what happens if someone has a fixed mindset is, for example, let's say that they're. They're told that they are good at chess or they're good at maths or something, right? They'll get to a certain level of skill because of whatever practice they did, and then they will actually be trapped in improving because they are absolutely terrified of failing, right? So if someone says you're good at math, they're not going to try something where they could fail, because if they failed, it means that their identity of being good at math is shattered. [00:03:35] Does that make sense? People who have a fixed mindset are unwilling to fail because it ruins their identity, their sense of well being. [00:03:51] Whereas someone who has a growth mindset. The idea is that anyone can become better at anything with practice. And practice requires failing and learning and failing and learning and failing and learning. [00:04:06] Feel the difference. [00:04:07] One is you're either good at it or you're not, and that's who you are at your core. [00:04:14] The other is you are this unlimited being who can become good at anything with enough practice. And practice includes failing. In fact, practice is mostly failing. [00:04:27] I'm learning to play Clair de Lune, which is a beautiful classical music piece by Debussy and something. I've always listened to that song and thought, what a beautiful, beautiful tune. And initially I thought, well, I could never play that. This is too hard. [00:04:44] And so I finally said, you know what? I'm going to learn how to play it. So I downloaded all these things on YouTube and I'm going to get this piano teacher. If I need one, I have one, but I haven't needed him yet. [00:04:54] And to be perfectly honest, I have only learned the first part of the song, which is the easiest part, and I have not yet perfectly performed the first part all the way through without any mistakes. [00:05:13] Right? That's where I'm at. So in other words, it's been nothing but failure. [00:05:20] But I feel really good about it and I'm excited to keep going because I do get some of the notes right. [00:05:30] And when I do, I'm like, ah. And I'm getting into the feeling of the piece, like I'm just tuning into it and I'm like, what would be the next thing? I'm just feeling into it. It's like, it's a beautiful experience, just the process of learning it. [00:05:43] And I am committed to cracking the code on this and being able to play the whole thing flawlessly. But it's going to be literally going to be probably 95% failure all the way through. [00:05:57] So in other an only way for me to get good at this piece is to fail hundreds, if not Thousands of times. I'll probably have to fail 20,000 times before I learn this, in all honesty. But I don't think of it as failure because I'm thinking of it as learning. So. So learning and practice looks like failure on some level, but actually, it's just the way that we improve. [00:06:25] If we have a fixed mindset, we are terrified of failure because our identity is caught up in either being good or bad at things. [00:06:36] I remember one time I launched a course that completely flopped. [00:06:44] I'd spent months working on it. I was so proud of it. I thought, okay, this is going to be great. We put it out there. It's going to change lives. [00:06:52] Nobody signed up. Nobody signed up. [00:06:56] And we were devastated, right? It was like, oh, my God, I felt such a failure. [00:07:02] And I had to look at myself and ask the questions, you know, what did I learn here? [00:07:12] What did I learn from this? [00:07:14] I could have seen it as, that means I'm not good at this. That means I'm bad at this stuff. That means that I'm just not the kind of person who can pull this off. I'm not good at sales pages. I'm not good at marketing. I'm not good at any of this stuff. I am a failure. [00:07:33] That's how I could have interpreted it. And part of me did go there, to be. To be perfectly honest. [00:07:38] But then I thought, all right, what did I learn from this? [00:07:44] I learned what doesn't work. I learned that the reason it didn't work is because it was really vague. I hadn't thought about what people wanted. I hadn't asked anyone what they wanted. I'd just come up with this idea without actually seeing if anyone cared. And. And nobody cared. And as a result of figuring out that nobody cared, I learned. [00:08:11] I actually. I relearned a lesson I learned many, many years ago, which I forgot about, which is, before you put things out into the world, it's worth thinking about whether or not people need it, but you don't know unless you do it. So I put it out there. I realized they didn't care. [00:08:29] I learned from that. It was a wonderful flop. It was a wonderful failure. [00:08:34] And it made me realize I need to go back to the drawing board, learn my lessons, and do it again, right? Since then, I've made millions of dollars because I didn't give up. If I'd said, I'm no good, this is never going to work, that would have been it, right? I'm finished. But because I took the lesson, then it turned out great. [00:09:00] So what I Learned from failure taught me more than any successful launch ever could, because I learned lessons that then I could apply in the future. [00:09:12] In many ways, when we're doing everything right and we're doing everything at the comfort level that we're at, we're actually stuck in a rut. [00:09:24] So, for example, the guitar. I play the guitar. I have not improved my guitar playing since I was probably 15. [00:09:38] All my guitar learning happened from maybe 13 to 15, and then I just got comfortable. And so I'm not very good at playing the guitar. I'm not very good at playing the piano, but I'm getting better at it by pushing myself to fail over and over and over and over again. [00:09:58] And the same is true with business. [00:10:00] Try stuff out, send out the messages, see what the response is. Learn from it, iterate. Make it better. Try again, try again, try again. So the fixed mindset is basically, I am either good or bad. [00:10:15] Talent and intelligent are fixed traits that we have at birth, and there's nothing we can do about them. [00:10:21] Failure is proof that you're not good enough. Because if everything is fixed at birth, if you have fixed levels of skills and talents and capacity, then if you fail, it proves that you are no good. And then that means that you might as well just give up. [00:10:38] It means if we have a fixed mindset, we avoid challenges to avoid failure, and we want to avoid failure because it proves we're no good, and then we give up when things get hard. [00:10:53] If we think we are fixed, our talent is fixed, our intelligence is fixed, everything is fixed. [00:11:00] Then of course we're just going to give up and say, well, there's nothing I can do about it. [00:11:07] It's like if you are a certain height, right, and you're trying to do a slam dunk, there's a certain capacity there, physical capacity, where you may or may not be able to slam dunk, right? Realistically, I was at a basketball court recently and I jumped just to touch the. [00:11:36] The net, right? Just see if I could touch that and I could touch it, right? But there's no way I can do a slam dunk, right? And no matter. Practice is going to make it work. I'm too old and I'm too short right now. That is actually a fixed reality that if I went to the best coach, basketball coach in the world and said, can you teach me to slam dunk? [00:12:01] He'd be like, no, it's not going to work. [00:12:05] But that doesn't mean I couldn't get good at three points. It doesn't mean I Couldn't get good at playing other things on the court if I wanted to. Right. [00:12:13] Does that make sense? But we're not talking about physical things here. We're talking about other practices. Sharing, talking, doing posts, doing coaching. All of these things can be improved significantly, but only if you have a growth mindset. [00:12:30] So now let's jump into what this growth mindset means, what it looks like. If you have a growth mindset and you try something and you fail, then you think, well, I'm learning, right? Failing means learning because every time you try something new, something gets rewired in your brain, and now you're better at it. So when I sit down to play the piano now, I'm kind of excited about this. I sit down and I can kind of just get into the zone and I can feel things are rewiring and things are getting better and it's exciting. But I'm still actually, practically speaking, if I was to go out into public and try and play this piece, I would be like, oh, no, let me start again. Oh, no, that doesn't sound quite right. And it would not be a very good performance. Right? [00:13:18] But I feel good about it because I'm growing. So when you have a growth mindset, you say, I'm failing, but I'm growing. Failing means I'm growing. [00:13:25] You have the idea and the deep knowledge that intelligence and skills can be developed through practice. Growth mindset means that failure is feedback showing you what to adjust. [00:13:42] Growth mindset means that you embrace challenges as opportunities to grow. [00:13:49] It means that you will persist through. Through the difficulty because that is how you improve. [00:13:58] Right? [00:13:59] Difficulties and challenges are the means through which you get better. [00:14:07] You can only improve by doing difficult things that you're not doing normally and then grow from doing it. [00:14:18] This is one of the most important things that you'll ever learn. And I really recommend reading that book, Mindset, because it talks about this over and over and over again in different ways. [00:14:35] The more you fail by practicing and trying things out, the more you will learn. [00:14:43] Your brain, your physical brain, needs to catch up with things. If you're not used to doing something, your brain hasn't got the right connections, the right neural pathways to do the thing. [00:14:57] And when it starts learning something new, there's a certain awkwardness, there's a certain discomfort, there's a certain amount of stress involved. [00:15:05] But then it gets rewired and then it becomes the new normal. [00:15:10] If we have a fixed mindset, we're unwilling to go through that process of discomfort to rewire and upgrade if we have a growth mindset, we say, the only way I'm going to get better is by trying stuff out, keep trying it out, and gradually improve until I crack the code. [00:15:30] Learning, trying, practicing, getting feedback. Learning, trying, getting feedback. That's the only way it works. [00:15:39] So growth mindset means failure equals feedback. That's it. Every failure is just data showing you what doesn't work so that you can try something different next time. [00:15:53] The only real failure, the only real failure is not trying to. The only way you can really fail is by giving up or not trying at all. [00:16:09] So with this piano piece, Claire de Lune highly recommend you listen to that sort of such a beautiful piece of music. [00:16:16] The only way I'm going to fail at that is by not trying. [00:16:20] But if I keep doing it every day, little by little, I will be able to do it. Now, maybe once I crack the code, I'll do a recording and I'll play it to you. [00:16:32] So here is the reframe. The old way of thinking about whatever you're doing is that I tried and I failed. That's it. [00:16:42] The new thing is that I learned what doesn't work and I grew a little bit. [00:16:49] The old way is I am not good at doing this right? I'm either good at this or I'm bad at this. I'm just not good at it. It's not my thing. [00:16:57] The new way is to think. I'm not good at this yet, but I will get better at it by trying. [00:17:05] The old way is to think. This is too hard. [00:17:09] The new way is to think. This is a wonderful challenge, which means that I'm growing. [00:17:19] This is rewiring my brain. [00:17:22] The old way is to think. [00:17:24] Ah, I'm just going to give up. [00:17:28] The new way is to think. [00:17:31] Let me try a different approach. [00:17:35] This comes back to pathways thinking. Pathways thinking is where if one thing doesn't work, you try something else, and if something else doesn't work, you try something else. Fixed mindset is like, I'm either good or bad, and there's no point. And there's only these limited options and there's nothing I can do about it. [00:17:53] Pathways thinking is, let me try different things. So, coming back to the piano example, I downloaded a bunch of videos from YouTube about how to do this. And one of the guys on the video, he was. [00:18:06] He was really annoying. He was like, okay, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2. And I'm like, look, I don't want the timing. I just want to know how to play the thing. I'll Figure the timing out. So. So I just couldn't listen to that video, right? I could have said, oh, well, I tried, and the teaching didn't work for me, so I've given up. [00:18:27] Instead, I went back to YouTube and I downloaded about five or six other versions of this, and now I have what I need to actually do it right. I didn't just give up and say, oh, this video didn't work for me. I found another video. Actually, I found five videos, and I have a piano teacher who I might consult with if necessary. [00:18:54] That's Pathways thinking it didn't work this way. What other options have I got? [00:18:59] So think about every successful person that you admire. [00:19:03] I guarantee that they failed more times than you've ever tried. [00:19:10] There's another great book called Bounce, which is where I heard about the book mindset, which is about how people become exceptional at sport. And he gives an example of figure skaters, right? [00:19:22] Figure skaters, Olympic figure skaters. They do these amazing, beautiful dances, basically, and they fall on their butt hundreds of thousands of times. Like just thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of times. They've fallen over in order to produce this profoundly graceful dance on the ice. It's absolutely incredible. [00:19:49] But they fell down thousands and thousands of times. [00:19:57] Anyone who has become good at something has failed over and over and over again. [00:20:03] So you could even say that the amount of success you have is proportionate to the amount of failures you've had. [00:20:12] Most people are so afraid to fail that they don't do anything. [00:20:17] So I want you to put your hand on your heart and embrace failure. Just say to yourself, I'm willing to try and fail thousands of times in order to succeed. [00:20:35] I'm willing to try and learn. [00:20:41] I'm willing to try things out and see what happens. [00:20:50] The things that you tried that didn't work, the projects that flopped, the offers that no one bought, the content that no one engaged with, all of that is just learning. [00:21:06] And every time you do something, whether it works or not, shows that you are brave enough to try. [00:21:14] Everything you do is giving you valuable data, valuable feedback. [00:21:20] Every time you do something, it's one step closer to figuring out what does work. [00:21:29] When Edison discovered the light bulb, he came up with thousands of versions that didn't work or hundreds of versions that didn't work before he figured out the one that did work. [00:21:40] And he didn't think of it as a failure. He said, I've succeeded in finding 800 and whatever things that don't work. [00:21:48] And then finally he found the one that does work. And now we all have light bulbs. Isn't it wonderful? Right? Right. If he couldn't be bothered to fail long enough, the light bulb wouldn't have been invented unless someone else came along and was willing to fail enough times as well. [00:22:06] So treat any recent failure you've had as something that you tried that didn't work out the way you wanted. But it was valuable, a lot learning. [00:22:20] And I want you to really take this deeply into yourself. It's something I've had to do and have to do again and again and again with any new project I'm working on that my success and your success exists on the other side of thousands of miniature failures over a long period of time. [00:22:42] I'm going to get good at playing the piano by probably 10,000 failures or might be more than that. [00:22:48] I will play the wrong notes thousands and thousands and thousands of times before I crack the code on it. [00:22:56] I'm going to send out emails that don't work. I'm going to send out stuff that people don't like. I'm going to try this. I'm going to do the best I can every time. I'm not going to try and do a bad job and try and do a good job. [00:23:08] But most of it isn't going to work the way I want it to. And that's all right. So if you can put your hand on your heart and say, instead of the shame story that I failed, I'm not good enough. [00:23:20] Let me tell the growth story. [00:23:23] I tried something. [00:23:25] It didn't work the way I expected, but here's what I learned. [00:23:31] That information is invaluable. [00:23:34] Now I know what to do differently next time. I didn't fail. I learned. [00:23:40] And it makes me better prepared and more experienced for the next attempt. [00:23:45] And you can say this out loud. [00:23:48] Failure is feedback. [00:23:53] I'm learning. [00:23:55] I'm growing. [00:23:58] I'm getting better. [00:24:01] This is a wonderful process. [00:24:04] I just feel that reframe. Feel how different it is to see failure as data instead of evidence of your unworthiness. [00:24:15] And read that book mindset. [00:24:22] So tune into this now. Is there any failure that you've been carrying shame about? [00:24:28] Oh, it didn't work. [00:24:30] Are you willing to release the shame? [00:24:34] Are you willing to actually learn from that experience? What did you learn? [00:24:41] It's worth writing this down. I didn't actually fail. [00:24:44] I learned. [00:24:46] What did you learn? I learned something. And now I'm going to try this. I'm growing. I'm growing, I'm growing. [00:24:55] So keep this reframe with you every time I tried it. [00:25:00] Didn't quite work out. I tried again. [00:25:02] When a plane takes off and goes towards its destination, it is apparently off course. [00:25:09] Something like 98% of the time is coarse. Adjusting course, adjusting, zigzagging a little bit, little bit, little bit, until it gets there. [00:25:20] That is all we're doing. We're on a journey towards something and we try something that's a little bit off this side, a little bit off that side, a little bit off this side. Keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it. Learning, learning, learning, learning. [00:25:34] And the edges get smoothed out. Gradually, the experience gets deeper. [00:25:39] You get more practice. Your brain gets rewired. You start feeling more relaxed. You start accepting reality as it is. [00:25:48] Before you know it, you will reach your beautiful destination. [00:25:54] So are you excited to fail more often? [00:25:59] Are you ready to try stuff out as best you can, learn from it and grow? You don't even have to call it failure. You can just call it feedback. Are you willing to do things and get feedback? [00:26:12] More feedback, more feedback, more feedback. Growth, feedback, Growth, Feedback and freedom. [00:26:22] Thank you, thank you, thank you. Have a beautiful day. Lots of love and many blessings.