🌀Au Contraire: Why failing is an option and the guru's are wrong

All we see on social media is the bullshit people want you to see. You never see the suffering and the misery it takes to accomplish anything. Suffering doesn’t sell. Suffering happens behind closed doors.

Maybe you’re like me and you fail a lot. Maybe you struggle with failure like me. If you do, this is for you. I am getting better at accepting failure, but I am not great at it. I have had massive and expensive failed business launches. Some cost me thousands and some cost me hundreds of thousands. I like to learn the hard way. Is it going to be painful? Good, count me in.

But my mindset is shifting. You’re not a failure because you tried something and it didn’t work out. It is quite the opposite. There are two types of people out there when it comes to failing. Those who don’t fail and those who do fail. And you don’t want to be part of the crowd that doesn’t fail. They are fucking losers. They are arm chair quarter backs. Back seat drivers. Cowardly critics.

Why? Because they don’t try. They never fail because they never try. So never consider yourself a failure if you are trying. You are not a fail’er. You are a try’er. The difference in these two types is one has the courage to give something a shot, and the other is a wimpy whiny weiner.

It takes a lot of failure to be good at anything. You have to take risks. You have to stretch. You have to give it a shot. And a lot of times it doesn’t work out. The real trick is how fast you can get back up. The speed at which you can mentally recover is critical. The professional try’ers move through failure fast. It is just an iteration that needs improvement or replacement. Failures are like a stair case, and the faster you can get over each step, the faster you can get to the top.

I am learning (the hard way) that the faster I can stop beating myself up over making a miscalculation the faster the pain ends.

Last Friday I was supposed to close on one of my businesses. I had been trying to offload it for a year and had several people interested only to waste my goddamn time. And I wasn’t getting much for the business, it wasn’t very profitable and it was just a time suck. So I finally had a buyer about to hand me a check and sign the agreement last Friday, but I had one problem with one little line item in the contract. It caused me to lose sleep the night before, and my gut told me to address it and try and see if I could negotiate it out before I signed the contract.

When I asked if he would be willing to change the contract and reduce the purchase price substantially, the buyer freaked out, got cold feet, and bailed. He wouldn’t even have a conversation about it. Goddamn it. Another sleepless night now wondering if I had done the right thing. I beat myself up over losing the deal. The potential buyer wouldn’t even answer the phone and just text me to send his deposit back.

It wasn’t a great weekend. But Monday came along, and I decided to punt and find another buyer. I started calling local businesses. We found another buyer in one day, and he started doing his due diligence immediately. And it reminded me that the faster I can recover from a set back, the faster I can start I can succeed. I put myself through a whole lot of unnecessary pain. That Wednesday the original buyer called me back, and wanted to close the following day exactly how I had proposed it. The deal went through Thursday.

It reminded me the faster I can mentally recover from something, the faster I can fix it. It also taught me to trust my gut. And trusting your gut doesn’t always mean it works out perfectly. You still might have to go through some pain to get the outcome that you want. But a lot of times, the right outcome is worth the pain. There is always a price to pay. Just don’t expect to see it on social media.

~Blue