All too often you hear of people trying to make “passive income” so they can go to the beach or live a dream life in the middle of a party. The thing they don’t tell you is that the only way their making a passive income is by surviving off suckers that actually buy the programme that will teach them how to be suckers off someone else.
Eventually we wise up.
The pyramid schemes only go so far. In some countries, like America, they are illegal. In others they topple and fell so often that everyone recognises it for the scam it is. A real, sustainable career doing the things you love is built upon work, not upon crops of gullible suckers willing to buy your latest e-book promising you things that only happen in fairy tales. And it takes work. Actually, it takes more work than you ever thought you could possibly do while you run the gauntlet of what does work and doesn’t work.
This is so scary to many people that they will never make a go at what they want, and they will become complacent and settle. As Ash Ambirge said in Guts,
So many of us are afraid to screw up; afraid to lose it all, go for broke, and risk what they have. They’re afraid of the unknown, afraid of things they’ve never done, and afraid of what it might mean for who they are. They’re afraid of what people they love will say about it, whether or not it’s a “good decision,” and most of all, they’re afraid it’ll actually work out. Because if it works, there are no more excuses. No more reasons to feel sorry for yourself. No more room for immaturity, for slacking, for rationalizing your life away. Success equals responsibility. And sometimes, if you’re in the thick of it, success can feel like yet another thing you’ve got to add to your to-do list; another thing to be overwhelmed by. And so, complacency takes the lead. Because at least you can remain on auto-pilot for a while. At least you don’t have to think too much.
It’s a lot easier to accept whatever comes your way, put your nose to the grindstone, and churn out what everyone else wants. I should know, I did it for a long period of time, and I still do it for a day job to support my other ventures and dreams. And, frankly, it’s easier to go into auto-pilot mode, do what I’m told, and forget that I wanted to even work my ass off twice as hard to make a company where independent researchers could collaborate and do their thing. After all, there are a million things to worry about without putting on the CEO hat and thinking about all the red tape to get through.
The good news is that we all screw up.
And you will too. You can try to mitigate all the problems, limit risks till they seem like nothing, but in the end you will do something that will cock it up. Get used to the idea now so you are prepared. You will fight battles of every variety. You’ll lose battles, too. You’ll hate just about everything and everyone (if not everything and everyone inclusively). Once you embrace that you will fail probably more times than you get it right, you’re on your way to the future.
Failure is a good thing.
Seth Godin said it best:
A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal.
A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.
We need a lot more failures, I think. Failures that don’t kill us make us bolder, and teach us one more way that won’t work, while opening the door to things that might.
Trial and error, as we know from history, teaches us a million different ways that things don’t necessarily work. Failure is just one of those things that we say, “Oh, that didn’t work. Let me try it a different way and see if I can do it (better)”. In other words, it’s just as much about doing it wrong as it is doing it right. Any scientist, whether trained in the ivory tower or the backyard, knows that an experiment gone wrong is the most fun way to discover something new because you get to find out why.
Admit it, you’ve failed before.
Owning up to failure is the first step to learning from them and becoming better. It can be tough because no one wants to look imperfect in the eyes of others, least of all ourselves. But that is where we need to change our mindsets. After all, if we can shrug it off when an experiment fails, why can we not do the same after any other type of failure?
Whether the experiment was money, software, tools, technology, balancing a schedule, or any of the other mundane things you’ll work with while transitioning from one career to another, it’s not going to work out the first few dozen times you try it. Something in the delicate balance of all you’ve got going on will be off, and it’ll all come crashing to a halt. If you’re very lucky, it will only be one thing, but in reality it will more likely be that only one thing is right, and you won’t know which thing.
Learning from failure is key.
Ever wonder why in job interviews the hiring manager almost always says, “Tell me about a time you failed”? They are looking for the fact that you can own up to failure, learn from it, grow from it, move on, and move up. It’s a complex action within our own brains that looks objectively at a scenario, analyses it, and then figures out a way to make it work (better). When we are able to learn from our experiences — good, bad, and really ugly — we humans turn into superhumans by applying what we know to the next iteration and getting results closer to what we want. We also learn to see past the problem to other little aspects and ask questions, thus opening up more avenues of exploration and growth.
Still need convincing it’s OK to fail? There are plenty of scientific journals out there that are interested in problems, and looking at what might have potentially went wrong, and at the same time, what the results of errors and failure were. And, as I’m thinking about it, I’ll even impress upon the Ink division of Insanitek to open up one of our very own so we can show failures from independents as well.
So, get out there and learn how to fail properly.
Your thoughts?
When you fail, what do you do? Do you ignore it, scrape up the pieces and move on, or do you get distracted by a shiny new problem? Tell us your tales in the comments!
