How To Overcome Failure
Before It's Too Late
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.
Until you run out of tries.
What do you do when one day you’re not allowed to try again?
The harsh truth people seem to forget when it comes to dealing with failure is that you cannot just ‘try’ your way to the finish line. If you are in pursuit of anything that is difficult, competitive, and worthwhile, there will come a day where the window of opportunity will start to close on you. Time will eventually run out, and effort lone will not be enough.
The flames of failure already consume us.
Time just adds gasoline to the fire.
Think about the failures that really stung. It’s not the trivial things that we barely think about, it’s the goals that we pour our heart and soul into. It’s the things that keep us up at night as we envision the future in our head.
If our lives on Earth were infinite, we could figure out what it is we love to do or want to achieve, and just try and try again forever. It will always be up for grabs, it doesn’t matter how often we fail or how long we struggle. If we keep going long enough we will eventually get there. There is no ‘window of opportunity,’ just a test of will.
But we live in a world where the tea gets cold and people grow old and things don’t last forever. The reason failure bothers us so much is because it threatens us. If you pour lots of your precious time and energy into something and it doesn’t work out, there’s the opportunity cost of missing out on other opportunities. If you are riding on something for financial security or a sense of identity, failure can mean the collapse of your world.
Your motivation and work ethic can be limitless.
But no matter which way you cut it, your time and opportunities are finite.
What am I getting at here?
Well I’m not trying to scare you, but rather trying to help you change the way you perceive failure.
You need to start thinking tactically. Your life is a strategy game, and failure is valuable information for you to make corrections.
I’ll use myself as an example: one thing that held me back from being an elite pitcher in the past was command. I walked too many batters too often. Remember I said how opportunities are finite, well I was coming towards the end of my college career. To play at the level I aspired to I needed to dramatically improve. It was now or never.
The problem was, I always practiced throwing strikes and locating pitches. The intent and the repetitions were always there, but the results were not. I even remember thinking to myself that I always felt like I did everything right and ‘looked the part.’
Instead of just mindlessly getting more and more reps in, hoping for a different result, I used the failures of the past as feedback and realized I needed to change my process and methodology. So thats what I did. I adopted a new strategy for training the skill of commanding the baseball and locating pitches where I wanted them. I changed my mechanics to make it easier to throw the ball more accurately. I made adjustments to my approach in terms of my mentality and game-plan. And on top of all that just completely changed my environment.
(I’ll get more into detail about these methods in a later post.)
This helped me transform from a guy who walked 1 batter per inning throughout most of his college career to a guy with a with a walks per 9 innings of 3.5, and regarded amongst his coaches and teammates as a strike-thrower with good command.
Then I started to get professional opportunities and was praised as a guy with ‘good command’ and ‘low walk rate.’ What a testament to my transformation that was.
What would have happened if I never made these changes? Well, then I probably would have just kept showing up and ‘getting my work in’ until the clock ran out on my college career. Doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different result.
Look I’m not trying to give myself a ton of praise, I’m just trying to get a point across. Do you think a dramatic transformation would have been possible if I just kept doing the same thing over and over? It’s not like I wasn’t putting in the work before, I was still grinding for hours and hours. Only now I was putting hours towards things that would actually make measurable increases to my skillset.
The problem with this idea of just getting up and trying over and over is that it reduces us to just mindless repetition, hoping that eventually things will just click. That’s not to say repetitions aren’t important for developing a skill, they are, but it’s not the only thing. It also disregards the importance of time constraints and having a sense of urgency.
If you are not currently at the level you aspire to be with your endless supply of repetitions, adding more likely isn’t going to do the job. You need to make an adjustment.
Being strategic is essential for making the most of your window of opportunity. Let’s use professional athletic careers as an example, which are notoriously short in the grand scheme of life. You are elite if you get the opportunity to play into your 30’s. Playing into your 40’s, probably a legend. Not to mention the field is extremely competitive and nothing is ever a sure thing.
As an athlete you have to make the most of every opportunity because they are limited. You don’t have the luxury of time on your side. You need to make it work as soon as possible.
This does not mean we can completely avoid failure. It’s just that we have to do more with it when we face adversity. When you fail, you have to process that information and find a way to not make the same mistake again.
Use it to fuel your growth. To evolve.
Then you will expand the window of opportunity.
That’s how you overcome.