The Reality of Failure
Everyone experiences times when it feels like a dark cloud is perpetually hanging over their heads, with every endeavor plagued by failure and problems. Everything you do seems to be cursed by failure and problems. We try to plan and schedule, and our lives will still be loaded with problems and failures.
Failure is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be used in our learning process. The reason babies learn so rapidly is that they try something, fail, make corrections, then they try again. They use this method to learn how to walk, talk, and get cookies out of the cookie jar. They are not afraid nor humiliated by failure. This is the same way that computers learn. Computers try something, and if they fail, they try something else until they succeed at the given task. This is called machine learning.
We can allow failures to direct us to the correct path we wish to go, or we can give up and have others take care of us. Computers or babies would never do this.
There are always people that no matter what they do, everything seems to work out right for them. With these people, everything that they touch, seems to turn into gold. This is where we get the term “the golden touch”.
King Midas kept wishing that everything that he touched turned to gold. One night a fairy touched him with her wand, and said “Everything you touch will now turn into gold.” And it was so, everything that King Midas touched turned to gold. He now has the golden touch. The first thing that he had in the morning was a cup of coffee, as he reached out and touched it, it turned entirely into gold. He was quite elated, as this seemed to be a large fortune to him.
Then King Midas was hungry, so he reached out and touched a donut to eat, and it turned entirely to gold. As King Midas was quite irritated as he was still thirsty and hungry, his daughter ran into the room, threw her arms around him in a loving embrace, and she immediately turned into a golden statue. King Midas died several days later hungry, thirsty, and lonely.
Was King Midas really successful, or was he also Addicted to Failure?
If King Midas had been doing his observing lessons, understood what his true passion in life was, and understood how to motivate himself and others, he wouldn’t have found himself in that situation. If he really wanted more gold, he would have worded his wish with much more care. If he would have understood his passion, he would have realized that good coffee, good donuts, and loving relationships are really all we need in life! If King Midas would have gone through the lesson on How Money Works, he would have fewer failures in his life.
You may have seen in yourself or in others, that we actually set ourselves up for failure. You have spent many hours, money, and effort going to college, yet you didn’t graduate or may have grades too low to get a job. You may be in the middle of writing a quintessential novel, and after years of time and energy fighting the resistance, you have finally completed it. Your friends tell you that it is amazing, you tell them that you are going to go over it one more time, get the website going, then you want to send it to a publisher. Forty years later your friends ask about the book and you tell them “I am still working on it and fine tuning it, it should be ready any day now.”
This could be your hit song, your ideas to create free energy, feed the world, or build a better mousetrap. You spend hours and hours and years and years, and you never seem to complete this. You easily are distracted by squirrels and other such metaphorical critters, but none of these distractions are your passion.
Here are some of the things that I have noticed that misdirect people to their Failures. When someone is being threatened to be killed by a thug or criminal, they will plead “I have a family!” or “I am just a simple person, you don’t need to kill me!” They expose their weakness to protect themselves from predators.
When people are trying to create free energy, they usually say that “They are going to send some hitmen to kill me.” They feel that success will cause other people to attack them. As we will learn in The Human Condition, they could be correct in this assumption. In order to protect itself, the Lizard Brain will create situations that lead to failure. It will make you forget things, misplace things, and be directed by squirrels. All of this will help to destroy the chance of success.
Other things that direct ourselves away from success. In the back of the brain we will be thinking:
1. Others will expect even more from me after I become successful, and I don’t know if I can handle this.
2. If I win the lottery, if I become successful and I have lots of money, others will be bothering me, begging me for money.
3. If I complete this project, I don’t know what I will do next, I will be bored and I will have nothing to do with my life.
4. The Human Brain doesn’t like a vacuum, if you leave something unfinished, then you will always have something to do.
5. If I put my information out there, people that are smarter than me will make fun of me and make me look foolish.
On the other hand if we fail...
- Everyone rushes to comfort us.
- Fewer people want to attack us.
- We think “They can’t kick a man when he is down, so why should I get up?”
- Criminals that are convicted of a crime have their sentences pardoned when they have a terminal disease with only months left to live.
- We can reassure ourselves by saying “I knew that this was impossible all along.” or “I knew that I could never really do this.”
It's always much easier to fail. Applying for a job and getting rejected is much easier than having to perform the job. You seek relationships that you know are impossible, so you do not have to put up with conflict that comes with relationships. When you fail, you can always sit on the couch and sleep in. If you succeed, you have to get up the next morning and train for the next contest. You get to call people up that won the lottery and ask them for money. It requires much less energy to fail, than what it does to succeed. There are more benefits to failure than success. It's much easier to fail than it is to succeed.
The Addiction to Failure works like any other addiction: food, sex, or any other drug. You go through the same withdrawals, and you return to your addiction time and time again. Everyday's a day on the road to recovery. You need to find your tribe that will help you through your addiction, if you want to have an Addiction to Success. Your tribe will help you create oxytocin which wipes out and destroys all negative addictions. We need to use our powers of observation to find out where our Addiction to Failure in our life is. We need to find what is feeding this Addiction to Failure. We need to find our passions so that we know what we can succeed in.
Get out your stickies. On stickies write down things that you want to succeed in. Then around those stickies write on other stickies things that will promote your success. Then write down on some sticky notes things that will prevent you from being successful in your life or will keep you addicted to failure. Only by defining our goals and what will deter us from our goals can we eliminate our Addiction to Failure. You are great and wonderful, thank you for joining us on The Road to Kaivala.