Pay VERY Close Attention to Your Failures – They Hold the Keys to Your Success

We've all been told a dozen platitudes about failure. For example, that it's not about how often you fall, but how often you pick yourself back up.

This is technically true, but if all you do after a fall is pick yourself back up and keep going, you're missing out on possible the most powerful learning tool at your disposal...

If you've been frustrated because you constantly have ambitious goals and you constantly fall short of them, the strategy I'm sharing with you today might just change all that.

The Implementation Problem

A person has a goal and a plan and seemingly everything they need to follow the plan and reach the goal. But then they don't.

I call this the implementation problem. It's when you have the means and the information, but you just don't implement, for some reason.

The implementation problem is the ultimate problem of the information age and its citizens (by that I mean: those lucky enough to be able to access information and not caught up in an existential struggle). Since you're reading this blog post right now, that means you're probably one of those lucky information age citizens.

If you can solve the implementation problem, the world's your oyster!

Stop Turning Away

I'm fascinated by how we fail. When we suffer from the implementation problem it's not the kind of "it was too hard for me" failure. It's a kind of failure that feels a bit shameful. We make plans, we make new year's resolutions or whatever... and then we just abandon our goals. For no good reason. Not because we underestimated the challenge. Not because we tried our best and gave up exhausted. We just kind of... stop.

This happens to all of us. And the mistake we make when this happens is that we turn away in shame. We don't want other people to know that we did this. It feels so weak of us to have failed like this. In fact, we don't even want ourselves to know, so we go into denial as quickly as possible. We try not to think of that time we were excited about a new goal and were sure we'd make it this time... only to give up shortly after.

My best advice for you is to stop turning away from this kind of failure. Instead, become really, really interested in it.

If you can deconstruct your failure. If you can take a really close look at it, try to retrace everything that happened - as if you were watching a slow-motion replay - you'll find the keys to your future success.

In my previous videos, I talked about the importance of combining productivity with strategy and how developing self-awareness will help you create a better strategy.

This here is another ingredient. It's a "how to" for that self-awareness part. If you want to develop the kind of awareness and strategic insight that will be most useful for making yourself more productive, this is what you need to focus on. Dissect your failures and see them as an opportunity to get to know yourself better. To become better.

Be Extraordinary

You know what I love about this? It's something most people don't do. It's uncomfortable. It's unconventional.

Think about how few people are actually pursuing personal and entrepreneurial growth to begin with. And now think about how many of those follow the advice of rah-rah, always-positive, look-at-this-new-shiny-object gurus.

Think of how few people are able or willing actually do something slightly uncomfortable like taking a deep look at their own failures. And then turning what they discover there into a strategy.

I love this because it's an extraordinary and rare thing to do. I've always sought out the extraordinary and rare thing. It's worked out well for me so far. I hope it will serve you, too.

Let me know what you think. Leave a comment!

P.S.: if you've been following my content on productivity, you've probably noticed that it's not exactly your typical, mainstream, regurgitated productivity advice. If you like that and you want to deepen your learning, give my course a look.