Failing is the most important part of winning…Here’s why.

Everyone wants to master success, but nobody ever thinks to master the art of failure. And the truth is, failure is the prerequisite to success. And I'm not making that up. If you just study history, from Michael Jordan's missed shots to Steve Jobs being fired from his very own company to Picasso's discarded canvases, you'll notice something really strange. Every single master failed more times than they succeeded. And to bring that even further, they have failed more times than majority of people have even tried. Samuel Beckett said it best: Ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better. So today I'm not going to talk to you about how to avoid failure. I'm going to tell you how to use it, because those who learn from failure learn to win at everything else. Now, if you're new here, my name is Matt Jimenez. I own a content creation agency that dominates in the YouTube space and have been doing it for the last 7 years. We have scaled our business past several million dollars in revenue, and I make these videos because I believe better videos start with a better you. And all the things I teach you is how to be better so you can be a better content creator. Now let's jump into why failure is something you should be seeking time in and time out if you want to succeed in life, and you could apply the same exact method to your content creation game. That's exactly what I'm doing, especially if you take a look at this channel. It's so small. It screams fail. It screams stop. But I'm learning from failure and I'm becoming a much better speaker and presenter in the pursuit of becoming a successful YouTube creator. The first thing that I wanna talk about is one of the greatest paradox. And this is the paradox of progress. Reason being is because when you fail, you think that you no longer have a chance of winning. But really what failure is, is feedback. It's how humans and machines both learn. When you miss the mark, the world gives you information. That feedback, not your emotion about it, is the very data that helps you improve. Let's talk about machine learning for a second. Think of this: an AI model doesn't feel bad when it guesses and gets something wrong. It adjusts the parameters and tries again. That's how it becomes intelligent. In fact, one of my clients that I work with has a SaaS company, which is software as a service, and something that they do do is sell automated trading softwares. And the way that these automated trading softwares learn and get better is by sending out thousands of data points or backtested trades that come back with data. And the more failed trades, the better these softwares get at predicting the winning trades. So the very act of failure is the very act of succeeding. That's exactly how my client has allowed these algorithms to learn what trades to take and leave the trades that failed behind. So failure is the prerequisite to success. Now let's look a little bit deeper at the psychology of failure. And now humans are the same exact way, except most people let their ego get in the way and interrupt the update that they should be getting. People always end up feeling ashamed instead of curious. They react emotionally instead of reacting rationally. The art of failure is learning to separate feedback from the feelings, to see failure as a teacher, not as a verdict. The thing is, people fear failure so much, it's not because the event that hurts, but it's what it means to them. Psychologists call that ego threat, and I'm pretty sure you've probably heard that before. When we fall, our sense of identity feels endangered. This is why people feel super embarrassed when they slip up and fall in public. It's because our sense of who we are, the calm and composed person, or the person who knows how to walk but then just fell, that identity is threatened. It's not so much the fall that's embarrassing, it's people looking at the identity that is no longer true because we fell. A Stanford study done by Carol Dweck discovered that people with a fixed mindset interpret failure as proof of their personal inadequacies. Now, on the flip side of that, while people with a growth mindset see it as feedback to adapt and grow. In other words, failure doesn't define you,. It refines you based on your mindset around it. Now, speaking about your mindset around it, Harvard research later confirmed that cognitive reframing, the act of interpreting failure differently, directly improves resilience and future performance. So next time you fail, don't ask, what does this say about me? Say, what can I learn from this? Now, on this third point, I want to push the narrative of how failure has an art to it. Now, I have 6 points that we're going to go through. And this is one of my favorite ones. After we cover those 6 points, I want to give you some feedback that you can leverage to help you start making better content with this new mindset, because I believe nothing is ever wasted. In fact, I made a video on that, and that's what the thumbnail looks like. Now on to number 3. Now, number 3 is the role of failure in creativity and innovation. See, every single creative genius was also a professional at failing, quite literally. Thomas Edison made 10,000 prototypes before inventing the light bulb. And if you look up any of the cool quotes that he said, one of them was something along the lines of, I didn't fail 10,000 times, I just found 10,000 ways that it won't work. When you carry that kind of mindset, which is a growth mindset, which we spoke on earlier, it'll allow you to manipulate reality to the point where you're guaranteed to win in life. Here's another one: Sir James Dyson made 5,126 vacuum designs before finding a single one that worked. Or better yet, I'm pretty sure Everyone knows this one. Picasso created 13,500 paintings, but only a fraction of them became legendary. A study at MIT's Media Lab found that teams who iterate rapidly, failing fast and often, outperform those who planned perfectly but moved slowly. Now, why is that? Because creativity rewards experimentation, not perfection. You don't stumble upon breakthroughs by avoiding mistakes. You discover them through mistakes. Number 4. This is what I call the performance principle. Possible. In elite military training and even in pro sports, failure is engineered. It's called stress inoculation, the idea that by exposing yourself to controlled failure, you train the body and the mind to perform under pressure. The Navy SEALs have a saying, and maybe you've heard it before: under pressure, you don't rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your training. The more you fail in training, the less you fail when it counts. That's why top performers don't seek comfort. They seek calibration. They understand that struggles create skills. Now, number 5 is the philosophical view of all of this. And if you know anything about me and on this channel, I'm clearly obsessed with personal development. And a large attributed reason was my involvement in studying Stoicism. Stoicism is the very thing that has helped me through all of my hardship and has helped me scale my business to over 7 figures in revenue. The Stoics mastered the art of failure long before psychology ever named it. Seneca, one of my most favorite philosophers once said, difficulties strengthen the mind as labor does the body. Another very famous Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, often practiced imagining failure before it ever happened so that way it would lose all of its emotional power. He believed that obstacles were not interruptions, but rather invitations to grow. I don't know if you ever heard the book by Ryan Holiday, which the title of that book was the very thing Marcus Aurelius always said, the obstacle is the way. If you haven't read that book, I highly recommend it. It was one of my favorite books. When I started to adopt a mind frame that will help me progress in life. Now, moving away from Stoicism, I got heavily involved in studying Buddhism. And in Buddhism, this same principle appears as non-attachment. You don't cling to success or resist failure. You observe both of them without letting them control you entirely. That's the essence of peace under pressure. Now we have number 6. Let me use this as the modern synthesis of everything I just said. Now, how do we fail Well, to master failure, you need a system. Here's how I did it. The first thing I did was detach emotion from evaluation. Don't personalize data. You're testing strategies, not your worth. And keeping that at the forefront of everything you do will help you immensely. Because remember, if you pull back earlier in the video, I said a lot of people don't try things not because they're scared of failure, but what failure does to them. And the very thing it does to them is it threatens their identity. So if you learn to detach your emotion from the evaluation and you realize it's not your worth, the outcome is not your worth, then you will be able to progressively try more and more and more without having to go through mental turmoil that could prevent you from actually getting to the goal that you're trying to hit. Now, the second thing that I did was fail small and fail early. You want to iterate in microstate environments and never in the macrostate environments. Now I know iterations are inevitable, especially as you continue to grow. You're always going to have to iterate, but there is two different moments in time where you could do a lot more iterations with less friction and less potential damage. Let's use me as the example. In my content creation agency, in the first year I only had 2 to 4 clients at any given moment. And if I wanted to change something, it was okay. I wasn't threatening the client's output for the week. I wasn't threatening the client's online brand. So I was able to change workflows, use different CRMs, move them to different systems. If I was to do that now where we have 15, 20 clients, that would be catastrophic, especially when a large portion of these brands and their revenue rely on my team's efforts to make sure that they're showing up day in, day out, week week after week. So iterations need to happen. Do them in the microstates and do it as much as possible early. You're going to still have to do them later on, but try to mitigate how much you do, because with every iteration there does come some type of failure to a degree. And again, for the sake of this video, failure is okay. Now let's go on to number 3. You want to extract the pattern because every single failure will leave a fingerprint, and that fingerprint will tell you what did not work And if you look deeper, it'll tell you why it did not work. In my business, we manage a lot of different brands and all of their brands make all of their money online. And every time there may be a mishap, we always use that mishap and dissect it. What happened and why? That gives us tons of data moving forward to the next week. If you see your life that way and you try to inspect what went wrong, you'll find ways to avoid that from ever happening again. You see, the act of failure is the art because what you do with it is an art form. There's tons to learn. There's tons to make better iterations from. That is art. When you're painting something, what do you do? You're making alters, you're reiterating things. That's a form of art. And failure is that just as much as success is a form of art. Now, the fourth thing, this is the most important thing out of everything. This is something I have said to numerous people. And in fact, one of my clients called me about maybe 2 weeks ago and he said, Matt, you were right about this one thing. And this one thing that I said to him is the very thing that I wrote down here. Stay in the game. You don't even have to be good. I promise you, if you just stay in the game long enough, you will win. You know, why is that? Because most people suck. Most people will not stay in the game. If you stay in the game long enough, you'll become the option, and once you're the option, you're considered good. So if you want to be good, just stay in the game long enough because everyone else sucks. Over time, of course you'll be good. Of course you don't want to suck, but over time, if you stayed in the game, you will iterate, you will find, you will maneuver to have something that is good, worth standing time. Because the biggest advantage of those who win is simply that they don't quit after losing. If you read the book Atomic Habits, James wrote, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. I'll give you one more just because I love books so much, and from books I get tons of ideas and inspiration. And this is one that stood out the most when I was making this video. And this one is from the book grit. Success is about stamina, not intensity, because failure will test your stamina. It reveals whether your identity is rooted in outcomes or in persistence. So maybe success isn't the opposite of failure. Maybe success is just failure but refined, because every wrong answer makes the next one that much smarter. Every misstep makes the next move even sharper. Beckett was right. The goal isn't avoiding failure, but rather to fail better. Because if you can master the art of failure, you can master anything. And what does this have to do with content? Well, the truth is, content is hard, and you don't get that instant gratification, especially if you're trying to grow on a platform like YouTube. And it could be discouraging. It could make you want to quit. But remember number 4: stay in the game because everyone else sucks. You just stay in the game long enough stay consistent, and you learn from every single video you think is a mistake, you're going to become a really affluent speaker, presenter, and eventually you'll have a big audience because everyone else stopped making content because they become discouraged. If you found this useful, share it to a friend that needs to keep going. And if you want to empower yourself to make better content, subscribe to this channel so you could find out what you may have been missing. Thanks for watching.