Fear of failure is the biggest cause of failure.
I’ve come to realize that to succeed at anything, you have to be willing to fail. Even better if you’re willing to fail fast and fail often. When learning something new, no matter what it may be, there’s simply no way around failing. Failing is as critical to success as getting an A+ is to a Chinese kid to be respected by his parents (or so I’ve heard—I’m not Chinese).
Let’s do a though experiment real quick:
Image you wanted to become successful at or in something, whatever that means to you. And let’s also assume, as would most likely be the case, that you aren’t that good yet at whatever it is you want to get good at when you first start out. In fact, let’s assume you suck, you have no natural talent at all.
Now, in order to get to where you want to be, you need to improve, of course. But how do you improve? Do you improve by doing the same thing over and over again, always successful, always without fail? That’s not really improving then, is it? That’s staying where you are. And, as we so axiomatically assumed, you started at the very bottom, the worse you could possibly be. So, by simple logic, we have to conclude that by NOT failing at something—not making mistakes and staying at the same proficiency you were already at from the start—it’s logically impossible to improve… Because improving means you were better than you were before, which requires a benchmark of growth, aka your “better” than you were before, which implies that you were “worse” in the past than you are now, which in turn, implies the version of you in the past made mistakes.
We can therefore conclude that success requires proficiency, which requires improvement, which requires a “better” and a “worse” version of you at some points in time, which finally implies a certain degree of “failure” for certain benchmarks.
And there you have it. A completely over-the-top, almost redundant, and way too complicated method—which probably none of it was necessary for you to believe what I was saying—to prove the necessity for failure in order to achieve success.
While we’re at it…
Maybe you enjoyed this email. That would be nice to hear. But then again, maybe you didn’t. In that case, I just failed at writing a fun and engaging email. And by realizing this failure I might just be able to learn yet another way, another method, another approach that does NOT work when it comes to writing engaging daily emails people like and keeps my readers reading day after day.
Which means that whatever the case may be, it’s a win in my book.
If you’d like to improve at your own email writing game, perhaps with just a tad bit less required failure than doing it on your own and trying out weird emails like I’m doing right now, then you might just be interested in my flagship course, Email Valhalla.
Check it out here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/