Fail Fast

During a long conversations with one of our potential investors last week, he made the remark: "a business goal of mine is to fail fast." Hmmm....interesting. What he meant by that is every business (new and old) is destined to make mistakes. Yet the quicker you "fail", the faster you can learn. The more wisdom you acquire, the better choices you make. The smarter choices you make, the more fluid and enjoyable life becomes. Problem solved. Nice.

But language can be tricky. For many, the world failure carries a strong emotional energy. Your parents might have labeled you a failure growing up or your coach might have threatened to run you to the ground if you failed. It's a strong word, I get it. But one of the life mistakes that I often see people make is not being honest with what's happening. Instead of taking a good look at how things are unfolding and being real, they are more comfortable creating a fairytale. Though it can seem nice and chipper on the surface, the story deep down carries a much different tone. Ignoring that can be dangerous.

So what if you were to allow yourself to "fail", and you saw it that way? But instead of wallowing in or allowing your self-talk to keep you down, the immediate next step was to ask: "what's my take-away? How can I learn from this? What do I try next?" For me, this has been invaluable.

All words carry energy. But in the same way that we are giving selfcentered a vibe, I would love to encourage you to give failure a new context as well. To do so, it requires you to be totally selfcentered. You must let go of the past baggage, become totally centered, clear, and conscious in the now, and allow yourself to open up and learn everything you can from the moment. 

My life feels like one failure after another these days. At times, that conditioned negative energy hurts. So instead of running away. I let myself hurt in order to let go of the pain. Once that emotion fades (as it always does), I look for my take-away, reflect, integrate, and make my next move. Will I fail again? Inevitably. Both not in the same way as before; and then I might be a failure but at least I'm not insane (doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result).