+1: #1135 Be Willing to Fail

You're listening to optimize with bryan johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one, continuing our little series on the science of courage. How about some more wisdom from Robert P. Zoie's Die? In the Courage quotation, he tells us, I quote again, herein lies the intervention related to failure. Accept it. We modern people have fallen in love with the idea that we are in control of our lives. And this worldview gives rise to an impulse to resist failure, to fight against the very notion of it. But just like the modern trend to defy age, the battle against failure is a lost cause. Failure is inevitable. We all experience it in forms large and small. It is in your past and it is in your future. People with a high courage quotient understand that failure is a risk much of the time and unavoidable some of the time. Rather than trying to tiptoe around failure, they simply accept it as part of the process of success. That's from a chapter called Be Willing to Fail. It's packed with powerful practical wisdom like this I quote again, failure is a fantastic learning opportunity. Think of every time you have made a mistake and said to yourself, well, I will never do that again. A single instance of failure can serve as a powerful lifelong course correction. Failure also helps us regroup mentally and improve our skills and strategies so that later attempts at goals might be more successful. Where your courage quotient is concerned, here is the tricky part. You do not have to accept that failure feels good, just that it is inevitable and often beneficial. Accepting failure is not synonymous with actively pursuing failure or enjoying failure when it crashes down upon you. The trick is to acknowledge both the positive and the negative aspects of failure. You you can tell yourself this does not feel good, and I am very disappointed with myself. On the one hand, even as on the other, you reassure yourself by saying, this is also a growth opportunity for me. I will learn from this temporary experience and move on. And then there's this I quote one more time. Where the courage quotient is concerned, it is instructive to realize that not everyone reacts to failure and or even the prospect of failure in the same way. Some people, as I have mentioned and as we have all seen, allow failures to overshadow their lives, restricting their decisions and leaving them embarrassed, timid, or withdrawn. Other people appear to take failure in stride and are able to move beyond it after experiencing its temporary psychological sting. Thomas Edison famously said, recalling countless problematic attempts to create a working light bulb, I failed my way to success. Winston Churchill, too, might be among the resilient. He once said, success consists of going from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm. Apparently the ability to reframe failure as part of a larger process learning, say, is instrumental in being able to cope with it. And well, that's today's plus one. Want to optimize your courage quotient? Be willing to fail and reframe your past failures as fantastic learning opportunities. Then get out there and give us all the wisdom plus self mastery plus courage plus love you got today.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hey guys, this is Brian with a quick little P.S. i'm really excited to let you know about an event we're working on. Plan is to make it the premier self optimizing event of 2020. We're calling it Optimize 2020. You the modern hero. Basic idea. Five days, 101 world class luminaries. 1-1 million people. You can learn more and get your tickets to the online and offline event at Optimize Me 2020. Again, that's Optimize Me2020.

Hope to see you there.