Get Over Yourself - How to Leap Over the Fear of Failure

Most people spend their entire life stressed without ever giving a single thought as to what it is they really want or what's important to them. See, I'm here to cut through all that noise, connecting you to yourself and the life that you were meant to live. I used to slave away at a corporate job that I hated, but I broke through the social norms and pursued my passion. As a result, I own my own coffee company. I'm espresso sommelier, and I get to travel the world. You too can live a life that you love, but it starts with getting clear about what you want. It starts with a new decision. I'm your host, Donnie Rouse, and you are listening to the podcast One Life. Get over yourself. You want to take on a new endeavor, but you have a big fear of failure. So the question is, how do you overcome that fear of failure? I believe that often that fear of failure is just getting it blatantly wrong, right? Doing it bad for the first time, getting judged for that for that first draft. And rather than going to the questions, I'm just going to kind of go into a story to help you think about your experiences a little bit differently. Think about any new endeavor you go to, any new skill you want to acquire, any knowledge you want to obtain, anything you want to learn. This is going to be something to get you over that hurdle of just starting. Because so many people, they stop because they're just afraid of the very first thing not going right. So you've probably heard of the saying shitty first draft. And the point of the shitty first draft was that the shitty first draft never is. It's never like the final draft, right? It's a shitty first draft. But the point is that you got it out. You put out the first draft. The share I'm going to give you today is called shitty first shot. Of course, I'm referring to espresso. And this one goes back to. I was listening to Simon Sinek. So Simon Sinek is one of my favorite influencers in this podcast. He was talking to Brene Brown and they were talking about shitty first drafts. They use the metaphor for shitty first pancake, saying that, you know, when you. Whenever you make a pancake, the first one is never completely has that perfect round shape. But, like, maybe not even the second, but the third pancake and the fourth pan can't even speak pancake usually come out perfect. As I was running on the treadmill, I was listening to this conversation they were having, and I was like, oh, it's so. That's so funny. Because it's the same thing with espresso. I just think of my life in terms of coffee. So I was thinking about espresso and how whenever I make a shot of espresso, like, rarely, rarely, and like once in a very, very blue moon, does the first shot come out perfectly right? The machine, I turn the machine on, it's heated up to the right temperature, and now I'm dosing the shot, I'm pulling it off. Very rarely does it. Does it pull right the first time. Sometimes it does. But often, more often than not, it does not. But I don't beat myself up over it, right? I go back, I grind more coffee, I stick the portafilter in the. On the grinder, dose a shot, tamp it, and I go again. Sometimes I will even pull. No bullshit. Sometimes I will go in and I will pull 20 shots before I get one that I am willing to drink a little bit of coffee. Snobbery there. But then why is it any different with your life and the things that you want to do, you want to have as a result, right? Like the. The skills you want to learn, the talents you want to have, the job you want to have, the business you want to start. Why is it any different? It is not different, right? Because there's this expectation for things to be perfect the first time around. If you talk to anybody who's successful, they'll tell you that is just not the reality of. Is the result of these little. The failures that you actually. The thing that they want to build this, what looks like perfection now and that it happened overnight. It is the result of all these failures that they were able to build this. Because there is no failure if you don't give up. So I was thinking about how this relates to my life, how it relates to this podcast, how it relates to. How it relates to things like the espresso course that I'm making. Sometimes I would take one step forward, another step back. I would start to do something, then I'd be like, ah, I'd freeze. And I would take a step back because it's not perfect. The most important thing for you to do is just to do the work, show up and do the work. Shitty first draft or shitty first shot doesn't mean, you know, like a shitty first shot doesn't mean, like, I put the. Like the ground coffee in the portafilter. Not measuring it out, and I make like I put a sloppy tamp on it. No, that does not mean that at all. Because that is just me pulling a Shitty shot. I know it's not going to taste good, so why would I even bother doing that in the first place? The same is true of your work. Maybe it's a project you're working on where your boss is like, you know what? Just give me. Or maybe it's a teacher. If you're listening to this, you're in school, maybe it's a paper and your teacher's like, just give us a draft. And you're like, you know what? Just throw anything on paper. We'll just throw a bunch of crap on paper. I'll hand it in. It's the first draft, so what does it matter? No, you still have to put forth the effort. You put your best effort forward and then you revise, right? Because if you don't do that, what you're really doing is you're kind of like chiseling down your self confidence and your self worth, right? Anytime you're not putting your best self forward, you're taking away from your self worth. I believe so. Notice that the only way for you to progress is for you to take that first step. And that first step, it's ugly, right? It doesn't, it doesn't always look good. We'll go back to the shot analogy. When I pull it, sometimes the shot pulls in, you know, instead of 30 seconds, sometimes it's pulling in 10 seconds. There's no way in hell I'm drinking that. But I made the first shot, right? Now I know. All right, well, the next shot is going to be better because now I know what kind of adjustments I have to make right Now I know if I have to. If I have to grind a little finer, I'll pull the next shot. All right, now it's starting to get closer. It's not quite the time. It's not quite the. It's not dialed in yet. But then I make one more correction and then it's dialed in. Where is there an area of your life where you've maybe you've just kind of been sitting on the sidelines because you're afraid of the criticism. You're afraid of putting something out there that might get criticized. You're afraid of it just not being perfect? Or maybe you're doing the work right. It's already completed. You don't want to put it out there because you're like, no, no, no, no, it's not perfect. Identify that thing in your life and then I want you to say one what is the worst that could happen? I mean, with these shot of espresso the worst thing is I dump it out and I learn that I have to make an adjustment, and I do a new one. I pull a new shot, I modify, and I do it better the next time. The same is true for your life. If it's a first draft, you get another shot, right? The teacher is going to. You're submitting a paper, the teacher is going to correct it. You're going to get corrections back and feedback for how to make it better. And then third, let's just. Let's go back in our lives. Let's take. We're going to do a time machine, right? I am. I'm snapping my fingers now. You heard it. And I just literally transported you back to one of the hardest experiences that you've had, right? Where you had to maybe complete a deadline, like an assignment for a deadline, whatever it may be. I want you to think through the process of, you know, putting it out there and having to do revisions and ask yourself this question. Was the final draft better than your first revision or your first draft? Was it better than the second revision? So it's just accepting the fact that you don't have to be perfect. The most important thing for you to do is just to do the work and to put it out there. Because as long as the idea is floating in your head, it's only in your head. If you're trying to impact people, you're not impacting anybody. Because the idea is. All the stuff is just in your mind. You got to put it down there. You got to put it out in the world, get the feedback and make it better. I hope you guys enjoyed this rant as well as I thought it was kind of clever at putting it with the coffee, because I get very frustrated when I pull a shitty shot of espresso. Sometimes I give up. Sometimes I make a bad shot of espresso in the morning. I'm like, you know what? Screw this. I'm not having coffee. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes it does happen. But then the next day I go back and I'm right there pulling more shots of espresso, because I love it. And what I want to share with you is that the only way forward, the only way to move forward and to make yourself better and to perfect whatever it is you're doing is by doing that shitty first shot. So hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope you got some tidbit of knowledge and you were able to relate to it in some way and apply it to something that you're experiencing. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing to the One Life Podcast. You could do so by visiting my website, www.donnyrous. o n n y r a u s dot com. There you can also ask a question or send a comment. That is all I got for you guys today. I hope you enjoy this podcast. Thank you so so much for tuning in. Remember, you get One Life, live it. God bless and I will see you again soon.