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“Failure is a bruise, Not a Tattoo” – John Sinclair

If I have learned anything about myself in my 37 years on the earth, it is this; I am really great at failing. I have found a million ways to do it and I will find a million more ways in the future. I am a natural at it. Most of the time, it is because I am going out and trying something I have never tried before. Sometimes, it is because I neglect the advice of those that came before me, and every so often, it is because I fail on purpose to see what will happen. Whatever reason I fail, I know that I am really good at it and that has made my life just that much better.

What makes me good at failing and why would that make me life better? Because I know that if I am failing, I am learning, and when I do manage to succeed at something, it is because previous failure has made it possible. All the failures in my life have led me to the moments where I succeed and without them I would never have been able to get there. I would not have the strength, the courage, the audacity and the endurance to keep moving forward despite the doubt, the fear, the discomfort and the naysayers. I would not have the expanse of lessons, stories, parables and experiences if I did not have my failures. Sure, they are uncomfortable things, but they are temporary, and nothing is so good a learning or teaching moment as a failure.  

The problem most of us have with failure is that we don’t see it that way. We latch onto failure and we forget that the wounds of it are fleeting and fading. Like a bruise, we often see a failure and press on it over and over, reliving the pain of that experience and making it harder to heal and thereby thinking it is an eternal tenderness on our lives. We see our failures as permanent marks that will always follow us because we keep poking it and never allowing it to heal but that is not the case. The black and blue dims and before long you forget it was ever there. You forget there was a tender spot there that hurt to touch. You forget that it was some ugly mark that you wanted to hide away from the world because they might ask too many painful questions about how you got it. You forget in a way that allows you to ignore the tenderness of that failure and approach it again in a better way and, before long, you are just not failing anymore and you forget you ever were.

But in order for failure to be a useful for growth and success you need to view it as such. Failure is a powerful development and learning tool, when looked at properly, and here is why:

Failure gives us a means of re-calibrating our strategies.

Failure is simply a means of correcting the trajectory of our ideas, our activities and our lives. If we know what direction we want our lives to head in, failure is a way of constantly correcting ourselves so that we do not stray far from that path. Think of an interceptor missile, zig zagging through the sky as it approaches its target. It’s doesn’t fly perfectly straight. It is constantly recalibrating itself to the movements of its target and to the terrain it is flying through. Failure is our calibration method. We evaluate where we are and we remember where we want to be and if those two places are not in alignment we adjust. It is your way of judging how far you have overcorrected or undercorrected in order to reach your target. No one flies straight through life to a target without some adjusting on the fly. The successful people in this world know how to recalibrate quickly, not let the failure set their permanent course and consequently hit the target.

Failure makes us stronger.

Failure puts callouses on your soul. It enables you to do the heavy lifting in life without fear of constantly ripping open a blister. The more often you fail the harder it is going to be for that failure to do any real damage to you, and the more likely it is that you are going to be able to absorb that failure and become stronger for it. It’s like lifting weights. When you lift, you tear muscle fibers so that they can rebuild themselves stronger so that, next time you lift, you can lift more. That is what failure can do for us. It can tear us up to make us stronger, but only if we get right back in the weight room of life and keep lifting the heavy shit. Because, just like in a weight room, If you don’t keep at it, you may lose the strength you gain from those failures and have to start over again.

Failure gives us wisdom.

Failures are an opportunity for reflection and with reflection often comes wisdom. Failure is our chance to take a step back and consider the cause and effect that created it. We can identify our part in our failures and identify the external things that were out of our hands. We can use failure to investigate, contemplate and eliminate the weak points in our life, and bring about the lessons to be learned and the wisdom to be passed along in order to improve. Failure is something we should loosely catalog away for future reference, because we never known when we might need to call upon those lessons again. A failure in one aspect of life can easily cause a failure in another and the learning that comes from any failure can improve the likelihood of future success in all. You fail in a relationship because of jealousy? This failure is deeper and wider than any one relationship. I guarantee it affects other aspects of your life and it is holding you back from success in the places, in some really fundamental ways. Really consider the depth and reach of your failures and use the wisdom gained from this contemplation as a source of future action.

Failure shows us other opportunities

Failure opens the doors to other opportunities and options that we had no idea we could pursue. If we keep our perspective on failure, and see it only as another stop on the way to our success, we can use it to find new ways to succeed and to find new things we want to succeed at. Failure is opportunity, in and of itself. Once you fail you have every opportunity to do anything at that moment. You can try again the same way, you can approach it differently, you can learn from it, you can hide it, you can hate it, you can beat yourself up over it, you can blame someone else, etc. There are so many opportunities that exist after failure, some that will ensure you never succeed and some that ensure you always will, and it is up to you to find the opportunities in that failure and use them to get it right.

Conclusion

You are going to fail in life, and if you are not failing in life you are not trying enough of the difficult shit that matters. You are going to attempt something that is just too far out of your reach. You are going to make mistakes. You are going to do some shit that you regret and, if you let it, it is going to leave a permanent mark on every aspect of your life, but that doesn’t have to be what you get from the bruises of failure. You can let them heal and you can learn from them, like a child learning to walk and falling down constantly; you pick yourself back up and you try that shit again. Because that’s how you learn and that’s how you get better; through failing and learning.

In fact, my challenge to you is to fail on purpose sometimes. I am not saying go out and do something that you have already succeeded at and half-ass it so you fail. I am saying, go do something you know you will fail at and use that failure in the ways I describe above. Watch what happens. You will see that a bunch of little bruises are not enough to stop you from eventually succeeding. In fact, all those bruises are temporary badges of missions accomplished and meaningful changes approached, lessons learned and wisdoms gained. And what it all adds up to in the end is someone who is unstoppable in the face of failure, someone always moving forward despite the setbacks. Someone who wears the tattoos of success over the bruises of failure.

Ahh, resolutions. Those empty little promises of change that we make ourselves that feel so heavy in January and become like airy bubbles floating away into nothingness come February. For most of us, there is nothing that rings so hollow as a New Year’s resolution spoken aloud.

Oh, we mean well. We want to change so bad. We want this year to be different and we genuinely have a desire to change, but why do we fail at our resolutions so often? Why do we lose that motivation, when we really have this sincere desire to change something or adopt something? We get so excited and inspired and motivated and we swear it will be different this year, but within a few weeks, we are right back to our old, shitty shenanigans.

Why is this? It is because most of us rely on motivation to change and motivation is a bullshit way to maintain anything. It relies on you to constantly convince yourself to do something that you are not used to doing, and your mind and body doesn’t like doing things it is not used to doing; so it is going to try to talk you out of it any way it can. It is going to leverage every excuse it can think of to get you back into your usual grind and disrupt the change you want to make because change is hard and maintaining something hard is not what motivation is good for.

What motivation is good for is STARTING something. Motivation derived from inspiration helps to get you moving on that new healthy habit or goal, but to truly make a habit stick – to maintain the hard work it requires to seriously change something you have been doing for a long time – you need discipline, because that shiny sparkle of motivation is going to fade and eventually leave you staring at a polished turd of disappointment. When it does, discipline is right there to kick you in the ass and keep you moving forward!

What it boils down to is this:

Motivation is like a supplement. Discipline is like a muscle!

Motivation is a big pill you have to swallow every day to see results and discipline is something that, when worked out constantly, is always there to give you the strength to do the heavy lifting required to maintain change. You can improve your discipline; make it stronger, harder, more difficult to ignore, but motivation… You need to keep feeding it and you are going to build up a tolerance after a while and need more and more as you continue to add things to your life that you want to improve. Eventually, you just can’t get enough and you give up completely.

Think about it like this; If I have to rely on a sense of motivation every time I want to get my ass to the gym, then I am always going to have an inner motivational dialogue with myself about that and it usually goes something like this:

“Hey buddy, don’t forget you need to go to the gym today.” Says my gentle, motivational voice.

“Oh shit… That’s right… Ugh… I don’t know if I have time today, though.” Says my lazy, unmotivated self.

“Come on. You can make time. You said you wanted to lose some weight this year.”

“I know, I know, but, it’s just so cold outside, and then I have to drive to the gym and back and I wanted to get some laundry done and I need to make dinner for the kids. It’s just not a good day for it.”

“Yeah. That is a lot of shit to do. Well, maybe you could work out tomorrow?”

“Yeah! That is a good idea. I will work out extra hard tomorrow!”

“Good plan! Now, let’s go home and binge-watch Netflix and eat a whole fucking pizza. We totally deserve it!”

Rinse, repeat, every single day and before long you don’t even bother with that dialog, because motivation curls up in a corner and plays dead, just so he doesn’t have to talk to your lazy ass anymore and hear all your excuses.

That is what you have to do if you rely on motivation to keep moving on anything you want to change about your life. That shit is exhausting. Seriously. If I had to have that argument with myself every day I would get nothing done. I would spend all my energy on debating and weighing my options and none of my mental capacity would go towards just doing the things I should do. So, instead of relying on motivation you should rely on discipline.

Why?

Because discipline doesn’t go for your bullshit excuses!

Discipline is a drill sergeant and it knows what you have to do and it is going to scream at you until you get it done. Discipline doesn’t suggest; it demands, and it makes a plan and follows through. It doesn’t give you a choice, so you never get to weasel your way out of whatever it is you are trying to do to better yourself. You don’t get to make excuses. You just do what is necessary, no matter what.

So, how do we maximize the presence of discipline in our lives?

Make the number of steps TO do something less and the number of steps TO NOT do something more.

You want to create the habit of getting up in the morning and working out? Have your gym clothes already picked out and waiting by the bed. Sleep in them if you have to. Shit, drive to the gym the night before and sleep in your gym clothes outside the gym. Or, if you are really serious about working out, sneak into the gym the night before, sleep there in your gym clothes and just try to find a goddamn excuse not to work out in the morning! That’s right. There is none because you cut down the steps needed to do it.

The point is, if you make it easier to accomplish the change you want in your life and make it harder to not accomplish the change you want in life your motivation never has to be bothered with your excuses, because there are none. You are already so close to doing the thing you want to do, so you might as well just do it.

Instead of saying “I don’t have time for that” or “I can’t do that” say, “That is not a priority to me.”

I love this one. Say this out loud next time you are trying to make excuses for not doing something you really want to do. Going to the gym is not a priority to me. Quitting smoking is not a priority to me. Spending more time with family is not a priority to me. Getting my shit together and changing for the better is not a priority to me. That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? What you wanted to change about yourself is a priority to you so stop making excuses and just be honest. If it is really not a priority, then screw it, don’t do it. I don’t care. The world doesn’t care. If it is a priority, then make it one and drop the bullshit. You decided you wanted to change that thing for a reason. Remind yourself of that reason often and remember it is a priority to you by saying it out loud.

Screw how you feel.

You need to forget all this shit about being in the mood to do stuff. Your moods are going to come and go and they will try to sabotage your new habits all the time. Changing takes effort and discomfort and you are not always going to be in the mood to feel uncomfortable. If you wait until you are “in the mood” or are “feeling it” then you are setting yourself up for failure because you are making your changes contingent on some arbitrary measure of your emotions at some particular moment in time. Most of the time you feel shitty because you DIDN’T do the things you wanted to do to change, so stop waiting until you feel like doing those things and just do them. I can almost guarantee that the confidence and strength you get from being disciplined enough to do those things will make you feel better anyway and that will get you to a place to make more changes.

Summary

Listen, change is hard. Sticking with something like a new gym regime or quitting smoking is fucking toil and strain until it’s not. I am not sitting here saying I have always succeeded in trying to change some bad habit or introduce something good into my life. I fail all the time and I will continue to fail, but I know that when I stop relying on that initial burst of motivation, and I start getting disciplined, that I succeed more often than not and that is the point.

Use your initial inspiration and motivation to set up a plan for discipline. If you do that you are relying on something that you can’t argue with. You are relying on a muscle that can be worked and strengthened and that will seldom fail you when exercised to the proper degree. What’s more, it will seep into other parts of your life and you will see the change you never expected and you will develop a strength, confidence, and courage that can make any change possible.

So, I have a problem with all this authenticity shit being tossed around in the personal development world. I don’t have a problem with telling people to be authentic. That is an obvious means to happiness and satisfaction. What I have a problem with is expecting people to know what their authentic self is when, for so long, they have had to be something they were not. I know it took me a long time to decide what the authentic me would look like. I had to work on figuring it out because I was already wearing a lot of masks that were forced on me by external influences. Family. Friends. Co-workers. They all influenced me to think I had to be something I wasn’t until I actually became that. My authentic self didn’t exist because I hadn’t the time to decide what it was. God knows I wanted to be authentic, but I had to discover it, decide what the hell authentic meant to me, and then create it.

My point is this. You don’t get to just be authentic because you choose to be or because some new age hippy wisdom says you should be. It doesn’t work that way for most of us and we are looking to build a different kind of mojo here. One that we get to create. So how do we find out our authenticity and keep it among all the other people that are trying to force us to be something we are not? Well, it takes effort and some heavy, repetitive mental lifting. It also takes some brutal fucking honesty and sincerity but it matters, because the only way you are going to find your mojo is if you figure out who the hell you are and what you are trying to accomplish in this world.

So what do you need to do to find your authenticity?

Get really honest about what your core values are and be brutally committed to them. 

The hardest thing to do is admit that you do a bunch of shit that doesn’t serve you and often goes against your core values. It makes you feel guilty and sad and sends you further away from what you are trying to accomplish. Are these negative things we do part of our authentic self? No. These are the coping mechanisms we put in place because we couldn’t defend our authentic selves when we were growing up. We all have a set of core values that drive our lives. Things that, when we live by them, fill us with mojo. You do something that really agrees with a core value, especially when it is a hard to do thing, you feel stronger. Core values are the building blocks of authenticity and they are our implicit claims to what we value in others of the world. They are not the only things we value, and we do not have to value what someone else does, but we need to figure out what values truly move us. If you don’t know what your core values are or don’t know where to start then go here. After you figure out your core values you need to commit to them fully and decide how they can be amplified in your life. This means making time for them by any means necessary. You value intelligence? Make time to read. Etch it into stone and know that it’s just something you do now, no matter what. Like blinking and breathing. You value health? Then shop better, eat better and exercise better. In stone. Never changes. Is that hard? Is that easier said than done? Why? Because that’s just not you? Because you need to take it slow and ease into it? You don’t even know who the hell you are so you don’t know what you are capable of! Listen. You just wrote out the things you value most in this world and I bet my life that you want to fully embody those things because you know they will change your entire life for the better. Well, if you want it that bad, then write it in stone and be that value no matter what it costs. As German philosopher Nietzsche has pointed out, and psychological studies about the short and long term happiness levels in parents versus non parents has reinforced, we do not always pursue the path to lasting satisfaction directly, sometimes we take a harder path and embrace the struggles of that path, because we know it has something of greater value to offer us at the end. We defer our smaller fleeting pleasures in order to grasp the grander prizes that we deserve. Finding and maintaining your authenticity will be a struggle, but it’s worth the effort.

Forget who you are right now. 

Yes. You need to forget what you are shaped into. You have been melted down into a hunk of malleable material that can be reshaped into what you should have been. You can’t dwell on the shape you used to be. You just need to focus on doggedly pursuing your values, because that pursuit will form you into what you should truly be. There is a quote by Aristotle that goes;

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

That is the goal. Do not spend any energy focused on all the crap of your past. Conserve your energy to spend on the change itself. You knew what you were. You lived it. It doesn’t matter though now because you are not going in that direction anywhere. You are going to where you should be. You know where you should be going now because you decided on your core values and everything points in that direction if you want to find your authenticity. So forget everything about who you used to be. 

Find and emulate someone who you think embodies your core values.

Sometimes pretending we are something we are not is exactly how we get to be who we want to be. Sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. I am not saying lie or deceive people about frivolous or big things. I am not saying lie to yourself about the effort that will be involved in all this. What I am saying is, how do you learn how to do things quickly and efficiently that you might have never done before? You watch someone else do it and you copy them! If I am not trusting of people, I can pretend that I am by acting in a way that shows trust based on an example of someone who is very trusting. The fact is, the actions I commit to define who I am and what I think. Now, my thinking might require some time to catch up to what I actually, authentically, believe about myself, but acting in a way that is compatible with my values will build up the stores of confidence in me that I am becoming authentic because I am acting like the person that I want to be. The first step in this is emulating the actions of someone else that embodies our core values. We emulate them until our thinking is able to catch up with our actions and we are not just acting in accordance with our core values, we are living in accordance with them! So read about people you look up to. Biographies are perfect because they are usually the idealization of someone and this gives us the opportunity to copy the extremes of our core values. Another great option is to find a mentor or coach that embodies the values you espouse. They can hold you accountable and give you guidance when you waver. Whatever you need to do, find someone who can be the compass to which you set your ship until you become someone else’s compass. 

And that’s that. Authenticity is a struggle. It is not a childlike discovery of wonder. It takes some hard work to peel back all those layers and get committed to who you are. It will take time and it will take effort, but when you are done, you will have the start of some serious mojo. Now go do the work.http://www.syn-scape.com
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