As you may know, I have just published my first book “Success Made Simple”, and one of the most popular chapters in the book by its current readers is “How to overcome the fear of failure”. Failure is an integral part of success. Without failure we cannot experience success but a lot of people try to avoid failure instead of charging towards it. The only way to avoid failure is by not trying anything new, which in turn means no growth.
Fail early, fail often…to succeed sooner
During my studies at Stanford University, The D-school had a very popular mantra, “Fail early, Fail often, in order to succeed sooner”. If you have never read the book “What I wished I should have know when I was 20”, I suggest reading it. It is fascinating. In order to accomplish success faster, you must try new things often. You must be willing to experience failure, learn from it and slowly approach success. Thomas Edison, said he failed over a thousand times in his quest to develop the light bulb.
Get out of your comfort zone
In order to grow, you have to get out of your comfort zone. You have to be uncomfortable. If you have gotten to a stage in your career where things are coming too easy for you, where you are on auto pilot most of the time, that could be evidence that you are no longer growing. You have to seek new challenges to keep growing. This leads me to discuss the 4 levels of learning.
4 Levels of learning
- Unconscious Incompetence: This is when you don’t know what you don’t know. You have no idea of what you need to learn.
- Conscious Incompetence: This is when you are conscious of what you don’t know, and are willing to go learn it.
- Conscious Competence: This is when you have learned what you need to know, but still need to think about it when doing it.
- Unconscious Competence: This is when you have attained mastery and you do things without even thinking.
Ideally, we want to be shuttling from levels 1-3. You don’t want to stay in level 4 for too long. Once you attain level 4, you want to start seeking new knowledge.
Be Resilient
The final step of using failure to propel yourself to success is to be resilient. Never give up. The truly successful people and the Greatest of All Time are the ones that despite adversity, never gave up. We all know of the stories of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Barack Obama, Lionel Messi. Despite unprecedented adversity, they were resilient and pushed through.
At your service,
Victor Lofinnmakin
Top Producing Agent
Tarl Anderson Properties
832-788-1782