Should you be afraid to fail?

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/

The fear of highschool presentations

Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

If you’re anything like most people, chances are you still remember the time back in high school when the teacher would force you to stand in front of the class and give a presentation about some random topic.

You’d get all nervous and sweaty. Your mouth would dry up so quickly that no amount of water would help. You’d stumble and stutter over your words.

Even more.

You suddenly became aware of everything you were doing. Where should you rest your hands? By your side? No that feels weird, behind your back, safe and hidden from view? No, the teacher doesn’t like that. The classic “in front of the crotch”? No, no, you’re not some bodyguard. What about flailing them around all the time? No, you don’t want to seem nervous—even though you very much are. And what about your feet? Should you lean? Where should you look? Oh god, they’re all looking at you. What if you say something wrong? How would you ever recover from this???

And on and on it went.

Maybe you didn’t experience those occasions as badly, maybe you experienced them even worse, who knows.

All that’s to say, this isn’t an uncommon experience.

But why is that?

Now imagine that you, at a similar age as the example above, met up with one of your best childhood friends (or a group of friends) and just so happened to start talking about the same topic as the presentation you had to give.

Your friend sounds interested and wants to know more about it. You’ve researched the topic for a while (or at least read the Wikipedia page) so you can talk about it for a while, if not for hours.

How easy (and even enjoyable, regardless of whether you truly ‘love’ the topic that was given to you) would that conversation, that ‘presentation’, be?

Answer: it’d be the easiest thing in the world, wouldn’t it?

But why is that?

And more importantly, how can we apply this knowledge to our current everyday life (I’m assuming you’re no longer being forced to give presentations in your local high school).

Well, for the answer to that question, you’ll have to check chapter two of my self-published and already well-received book titled,

“The Art of Loving to Write“.

(Available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle format)

It’s an incredibly short, yet powerful, read. And one so inexpensive (as opposed to some of my other products) everyone can afford it.

No matter who you are or what market you’re in. If you do any type of writing in your life (professional or personal), I can guarantee this book can and will be useful to you—so useful in fact that you’re likely to see immediate improvements the same day after you finish reading the book.

Which, good news, the book is short enough for you to finish it in one sitting if that’s what you like

Anyway, here’s the link to get your hands on The Art of Loving to Write: https://alexvandromme.com/loving

It pays to be scared

One of the leading causes of death for professional skydivers, ironically, is the diver becoming too comfortable falling.

They become so comfortable they pull too late—or forget to pull their chute at all.

Another case.

One of the leading causes of death for professional freedivers is also becoming too comfortable (in the water). More specifically, too comfortable holding their breath.

Due to frequent practice of holding their breath, they become ‘immune’ to the negative feelings paired with a lack of oxygen.

They become so used to it in fact that it’s entirely possible for a diver to keep swimming, holding their breath comfortably and without any issues until suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, their brain shuts off and they lose consciousness altogether.

Both of these facts sound surreal and almost fake to the non-professional.

Yet we experience it everyday with everything we do.

I don’t fear falling when riding a bike anymore—while I used to be extremely scared to do so when I was younger.

Most people aren’t anxious 24/7 while driving. Hell, most experience drivers repeatedly doze off while driving, not even thinking about what they’re doing. Yet people who just started learning will tell you how scared they are—they couldn’t imagine NOT paying attention.

I once saw a documentary about snake venom.

And there are these people whose job it is to breed snakes and drain their venom to help with medicine and antidotes and whatnot. Extremely venomous snakes as well. It’s a dangerous job. One bite can kill you for good if you’re not paying attention.

There was this one guy working there we said, and I still remember this well, “The day I stop being scared is the day I resign”.

And it even happens in his profession where people stop being scared, only to doze off and accidentally get bitten.

My point is this.

The more used to get to something and the more experienced you become, the less you’re aware of the risks involved in what you’re doing.

This is also true for social media.

I used to post on Twitter religiously ever single day. During that time I’d often see people getting blocked, restricted, or outright banned indefinitely.

Yet for some reason I thought “this will never happen to me, I’m not doing anything wrong.”

What a young an naive person I was.

Just a while later I unexpectedly woke up to a notification telling me my account had been suspended. It can happen just like that—without you even knowing why.

In fact, the longer you stay, the more likely you’ll get banned, hacked, or something equally terrible happens to your profile.

Moral of the story: It pays to be scared.

So build your email list.

And if you want to know how I built mine, how I write my emails, and more importantly, how I get paid for doing so.

Then check out Email Valhalla here to learn more: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla