If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
That’s a quote from Thomas J. Watson, the former CEO of IBM, who helped grow the company in its glory days.
There, in a few words, reveals a simple and powerful path to success.
Sure, a lot of self-improvement advice teaches you not to fear failure, but it’s almost cliché—everyone knows they shouldn’t fear failure. But few people will actually tell you, “You’re not failing enough. You have to fail much, much more.”
Here’s why you should start increasing your failure rate and how it can transform your life in ways you might not even realize.
Why You Need to Fail More
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
— Robert Kennedy
Failing regularly trains you to handle stress and bounce back from tough times. Ultimately, the only way to stop fearing failure is to fail—a lot.
The more you fail, the more your body will learn to regulate and handle those emotions so you can act in spite of them. Also, dealing with failure — and trying again as soon as possible after — will help you become more resilient and successful in the long run:
The researchers [at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management] found, in contrast to their initial expectations, that failure early in one’s career leads to greater success in the long term for those who try again. ‘The attrition rate does increase for those who fail early in their careers… But those who stick it out, on average, perform much better in the long term, suggesting that if it doesn’t kill you, it really does make you stronger.’
In my life, if I’m not failing regularly, it’s a huge sign that I’m not pushing myself hard enough—I’m not going past my comfort zone or testing my limits.
Instead, I’m playing life too safe.
After all, it’s rare to meet people who actually go out and willingly seek failure on a regular basis. Yet that’s why so many people never achieve what they want: To them, failure is so damaging personally—whenever they get a “no” or some criticism, they feel sad and hurt. Sure, they don’t have to like those rejections, but if they can’t handle them, they’ll be thrown off by everything in life.
Those who only do what they feel like, don’t do much. To be successful at anything you must take action even when you don’t feel like it, knowing it is the action itself that will produce the motivation you need to follow through.
— Hal Elrod
When was the last time you had a stinging failure? When was the last time you actually attempted to fail? When was the last time you knew the odds of success were ridiculously low, but you gave it a shot anyway?
If it’s rare — or you’ve never experienced something like that before—it’s time to start failing a lot more.
Why 2x Failure Will *More-Than-2x* Your Success
You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
—Richard Branson
At the most basic level, failing more will automatically increase your success because you’ll try more. For example, in basketball, to fail more means to shoot more shots; but if you shoot more shots, you’ll most likely make a few more shots too.
But failing more offers extra benefits: When you double your failure rate, I’m confident you will more-than-double your success rate. (You might even triple or quadruple it.) Why?
Because every time you fail, you’ll learn something new and get real-world experience to improve your chances the next time. Ultimately, you’ll learn more from that one failure than you could if you just read books but never tried. That’s because the body has a natural learning process: Just by doing an activity over and over again, you will naturally get better.
…the physical body, including the brain, memory bank (conscious and unconscious) and the nervous system — is a tremendously sophisticated and competent collection of potentialities. Inherent within it is an inner intelligence which is staggering. What it doesn’t already know, this inner intelligence learns with childlike ease. It uses billions of cells and neurological communication circuits in every action.
—W. Timothy Gallway, “The Inner Game of Tennis”
The more you fail, the more you learn. You’ll uncover the strategies that work and eliminate the ones that don’t. You’ll pick up little skills and tricks because of how often you’re trying. You’ll become more confident and sure of yourself because of your ability to handle failure. And when you put all of that together, your success rate will skyrocket.
When I learned how to talk to people, I forced myself to talk to strangers every day for 90 straight days. At the start, I failed a ton—I had no idea what I was doing, I was nervous, and I couldn’t think because every conversation felt like it was going 100 mph.
But as I kept failing, something weird happened:
I naturally started getting better.
I learned what to say and what not to say. The little things I struggled with in the beginning became second nature. Time slowed down and I could actually relax and be in the moment. I even started feeling more confident and sure of myself.
By the end of those 3 months, I was a changed man—failures were much rarer, and I got to the point that I could talk to almost anyone at any time and almost always have good conversations.
How to Start Failing More
The first step is to find out what you want to achieve. What are your biggest goals? What does success look like to you? Map that out and work backward because, if you don’t have specific goals, you won’t know how to fail more.
Don’t just fail for the sake of failing; fail to help you get to where you want to go. Sure, failure is valuable (as I explained), but success is even sweeter — that’s what the ultimate goal is.
The second step is to figure out how you can fail more to help you accomplish your dreams. Email more people? Pitch more articles? Take on more projects at work? Ask more people out on dates? (Again, this depends heavily on your goal.)
Then, track how many times you fail currently and beat the number. Also, make sure you’re failing regularly in life otherwise it’s a huge sign you’re staying stagnant and not trying hard enough.
By failing more, you’ll gain incredible freedom as you embrace discomfort, shatter your comfort zone, and overcome whatever response you get. And you’ll boost your success rate as you gain real experience, make adjustments, and learn on the fly.
One attempt has the ability to change the entire trajectory of your life.
Double your failure rate and watch your success grow.
And make the path to your goal a lot simpler.
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