Failure Tolerance

Your willingness to fail determines what you are willing to attempt.

You want the result. You want the money, the freedom, the weight loss, or the business. You can picture it, and you would love to have it.

But are you willing to go through the process that creates it?

Not just the part where you work hard and everything goes well. The part where you try, miss the mark, and have to do it again.

I want to give you some tough love about this because I see people give up on dreams they genuinely want. Their failure tolerance is so low that the first difficulty becomes the reason to quit.

Rate your failure tolerance

On a scale of one to ten, how willing are you to fail?

When an attempt does not work, do you want to study it, learn, and try something else? Or do you complain, make excuses, and decide it cannot be done?

Maybe you avoid making the attempt at all. You are still deciding on your business idea, whether to run an ad, or which protocol to follow. As long as you are deciding, you do not have to risk finding out that an action did not work.

That is not evidence of a high failure tolerance. It is a way to avoid failure.

Now imagine your tolerance were a ten. What would you be willing to do that you are not doing now?

Failure is not a verdict on you

Many of us learned to treat an F as the end of the story. The grade meant something about who we were. We were rewarded for knowing the answers and getting them right.

Imagine learning that an F was the beginning instead. It showed you what you had not learned yet. You could look at the questions, understand what happened, and keep working.

That is the approach I want you to practice.

In the Model, a result can be described neutrally. You made an offer and someone said no. You followed a protocol and did not get the result you wanted. Those are data.

The interpretation that you failed goes in the thought line. That thought creates a feeling. The feeling may be uncomfortable, but you can allow it instead of organizing your whole life around avoiding it.

You are the watcher of the Model

Where are you in your Model?

I want you to consider that you are the one observing and creating it. You can watch your thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. You are not reduced to any one of those components.

Your worthiness does not change because an action did not produce the result you wanted. You do not become less worthy because you had a thought or felt an emotion.

When you understand that separation, you can look at the Model without using it against yourself. You can look at a result and learn rather than turn it into proof that you are not enough.

There is you, worthy, and there is information about what happened. You can work with that information.

Attempts move you forward

We often act as though success is the only thing that counts as progress. But we learn through our attempts.

You take an action and see what it produces. Whether it works or not, you have information you did not have before.

Stagnation does not give you that. Failing ahead of time by not trying does not show you what you could have done. It keeps you from finding your current limits.

If you set a goal you can easily reach, you may never discover how much more you were capable of. Pushing toward a result you may not achieve gives you an opportunity to learn where you are and what you need to develop.

That is why I want you to increase your failure tolerance and decrease your tolerance for stagnation.

Learn how by doing

Students sometimes wait for me to tell them exactly how to create the result. I can give instructions, and following them can be a useful beginning.

But when you want to create something extraordinary, there may not be a set of instructions. If something has never been done, someone has to learn by doing it.

You can be the person who figures it out.

When you feel confused about what to do, find something you can try. If it works, keep doing it. If it does not, learn from it and try something different.

That is massive action. You keep changing the actions until you create the result, rather than treating the first attempt as the final answer.

Keep improving the attempt

If you are selling something, you may make an offer and hear no. You may ask another person and hear no again. You may change the way you ask and still hear no.

You keep going, evaluating and adjusting, until you get to yes.

This does not mean doing sloppy work just to say you tried. Plan what you are going to do. Execute it. Pay attention to what you learn.

Do the best version of what you currently know how to do, then improve it. Be willing to do that again when part of you is unsure it will work.

That is different from being reckless. I am not suggesting you throw caution away or put one hundred thousand dollars on red at a casino and call losing it a useful failure. I am talking about thoughtful attempts that give you knowledge you can use.

Willingness creates energy

When you are afraid of failing, you can feel defeated before you begin. You procrastinate, avoid, and have very little energy behind the thing you say you want.

When you become willing to fail, you become willing to do more. You want to see what happens. You want to learn. You are no longer waiting for the guarantee that would remove every uncomfortable feeling.

Your confidence develops through the evidence that you can experience emotion and keep going. Each attempt becomes part of that evidence.

You do not have to know you will get the result on the first try. You can know you are willing to be uncomfortable while you learn.

Sign up for the whole process

The goal is not only a result someone could hand you. It is also the journey that asks you to grow, build strength, and become resilient.

Are you willing to get an F several times before you earn a B minus? Are you willing to take a class where you do not already know how to get an A?

That is where you ask something new of yourself.

You can acknowledge that your messaging did not work, that you did not apply yourself, or that you did not plan your food ahead of time. You can tell the truth, learn, and try again.

Let it be hard. Let yourself become stronger through the process. The easier it would be to quit, the more proud you can be when you keep going.

You already want the result. Now decide whether you are willing to learn your way to it.