Most Failures Keep You Stuck (Instead of Making You Smarter)

What if I told you all of your mess-ups were actually for no reason? And this is not no woo-woo hippie video. In fact, everything I'm going to show you today is backed up by mental models, historical proof, and philosophical teachings. You see, I've been in the entrepreneurial space for over 7 years now, and during that time I've had loads of mishaps and fuck-ups that I deemed at the moment to be catastrophic. But this very principle that I'm going to be teaching you today allowed me to rewire my mind to see these things as completely different than what I thought they were. And this exact thing has allowed me to scale my business to well over a few million dollars in revenue. Now, I want to show you a mental model to help illustrate exactly what's happening here when you think that you're making a mess up, especially when you're on a journey to achieve something great, like a very big goal that you set out for yourself. Now, this right here is something I call the Nothing's Wasted mental model, and it's very similar to the learning curve chart if you've ever seen one of those. Now, the way that I like to see this is this dot right here is you, and this right here is a chart of how long it's going to take you to achieve your goal. Now, on the way to your goal, the only thing in between you and it is time. And of course, time with efforts. So if I was to put a clock here, and the clock is represented by line. Line is time. So if you are this black dot and this is your goal, the only thing in between is time under effort. And if I was to put a line representing time, there's also a bunch of other lines going in opposite directions that are on the way to the goal but may take vastly longer to actually achieve the goal. Now, every time you try something and it didn't work, while that may seem like wasted effort, what you're doing is actually a process of elimination, ultimately compressing the time to goal. Now, every time you do one of these, one of them are eliminated. So imagine if I was to gather every single one of these lines and plot it at the very bottom of this chart. What would happen is every single time I go to attempt the goal but it was a miss or a wasted effort, actually what I'm doing is speeding up my arrival to the goal because I'm eliminating another variable of time. So the more variables of time that you delete to achieve your overall goal, the faster you actually achieve that goal. So Every time you attempt something, you're deleting one of these variables, ultimately bringing the goal closer to the arrival. The less attempts that you try at a goal, the more parallels of time there are that you could potentially take to the goal, which ultimately extends the goal out vastly further. You see, if you are here now and there are a bunch of parallels of attempts of something The more that are there, the further there is to achieve the goal. But if I just tried a few different things, now all of those are eliminated, bringing the goal closer. It's inevitable that you would achieve your goal if you understand this model. Now, I'm no Picasso, and if this did not make it clear, let me tell you some historical references that actually prove this to be correct. Thomas Edison made this model the most simple way possible. And I quote, I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. With that being said, each waste was actually narrowing the path to success. Another amazing historical reference that I like to look at, and not only for this, but through many things throughout life. When societies collapse and there's failure amongst civilizations, there's many things that we can extract from that because why? Nothing is actually wasted. So when we look at the fall of Rome, it actually demonstrates what happened here, because during the fall of Rome, yes, there's many things that attributed to it. But one of the main key characteristics was from internally, because they stopped seeing failures or problems as lessons. In fact, they numbed any problems that they had during this era with decadence and indulgence. In fact, this era was often called bread and cruises. The very thing that made Rome great was its ability to find lessons in hardship, which is something they left behind, which is one of the key factors that led them to becoming a weak civilization that shortly collapsed. Instead of building resilience through challenge, Rome numbed itself with entertainment. They started to treat discomfort as something to escape. Rome wasted its struggles and paid the ultimate price. Now you might be saying, how does this actually apply? Because contrast creates clarity. When you see it on a grand scale like society, losing the ability to find the usefulness in problems because the opposite side of a problem is purpose, which is something that Rome ignored. They had problems and they would ignore it with entertainment and bread and indulgence and hedonistic ways. So this is a grand scale model, right? Society stopped caring about problems or finding the lessons in problems and actually used entertainment to numb present problems within their civilizations. And many philosophers actually wrote about this in their time. And of course, on a small scale, earlier this week I actually tried to film a video for you guys, and it took me several hours from the ideation to the script outline to articulating myself on how I want to actually present this information. And once I did all that, I hit record and I filmed for about 2 hours, and I had one of the hardest times trying to get this information across. And I continued fumbling on my words and running in circles, trying to make examples that were actually palatable to the mind. And once I was finished, I felt like I ran a marathon. When I checked the camera, it wasn't even recording. And in that moment, I realized that this had happened to me in my earlier stages of entrepreneurship. And this is when it clicked. And this is where I got the spark to make this video. In that moment when I saw that, I immediately saw this wasted 2 hours of trying to shoot a video as practice for the video. So I hit record and I tore through the video in about 30 to 45 minutes because I did vastly more preparation through the wasted time and I was way more equipped to make an eloquent video for you guys to understand exactly what I was talking about. If you're curious what video that was, it was this one up above. Now I want to use two different teachings of philosophy that actually exacerbates the problem of not being able to find lessons in hardships or wasted time. You see, you have two camps. You have the Stoics and then you have the Epicureans. Now, I'm positive most of you know what Stoics were, but a large portion of you probably never heard of the other camp that I just said. The Epicureans were followers of a Greek philosopher, Epicurus. And the big difference between them and the Stoics is this: they believe that pleasure is the highest good. Basically, hedonistic living, but not wild partying. Epicurus defined pleasure as absence of pain and peace of mind. They also avoided hardship and pain. They believed the smart life was one of ease, avoiding politics, avoiding stress, and seeking comfort. They also had a materialistic worldview. They thought everything was at most an avoid, with no divine punishment or afterlife. They were really big on simple living. They weren't about luxury excess, more like living quietly with close friends, enjoying simple food and avoiding drama. And while that sounds amazing and we'd probably all want that, we all know when that becomes the main focus of existence, we become weak. And this is the very pivotal moment in which people start to see hardship as something they want to avoid rather than it being something that just gave them raw material or wisdom. You see, every single problem is actually material that you can use to upgrade your psyche. Everything throughout my life that I've had to go through gave me two options, was either self-sabotage or self-actualization. And every single time I chose self-sabotage, I stifled my growth as a human. And there's no such thing as stifling. So when people say stifle like I just did, it's actually digressing. So if you're not growing, you're digressing by default because time is going on. So every time I chose self-sabotage,, I digressed as a human. Every time I chose self-actualization, I progressed further and I allowed that hardship to become raw material that I used as wisdom or something to speed up the curve to success. And this is why Stoics were extremely successful. And this is why their teachings are still popular today, because Stoics embrace hardship and they used it to build virtue. And the Epicureans avoided hardship and seek comfort. Now, there's many other mental models that prove this to be true. And I'm pretty sure all of us have heard of the opportunity cost. But have you heard of the opportunity cost reversal? And if you haven't, to put simply, it's moments in time where things look like a loss, whether that be money or time, but actually it's exchange of knowledge. I myself have tried many things and every single time something didn't work out, I would always call that the cost of tuition. That is the price you have to pay for the knowledge that you acquired to know that thing didn't work. That's essentially the opportunity cost reversal. And when you start to see everything as not a waste and you see everything as a gain, the universe has a very unique way of proving that. So in fact, if you do this enough times, you frame your mind and position it to only see gain in all situations. And if you only are able to see gain in all situations, by default, your life will start proving that to be true. There's a Japanese philosophy called the kaizen. Every misstep reveals the next step to improve. And I could sit here and go through historical references and philosophical quotes and teachings that highlight nothing is a waste, and I could even draw another chart for you, but I'm not. I'm going to give you actionable things that I did that you could start doing in your life to start reframing everything as a massive W rather than a massive loss. So if you're into business and entrepreneurship is exactly the reason why you're watching these videos, or whether that just be self-development and improvements. Let's start pulling apart some scenarios in which you could start using to help frame things as wins in life rather than losses. For instance, most business owners need a form of marketing, and most forms of marketing today are organic content and paid content. In the paid sector, or even in the organic sector of creating content, when you run ads, there's a cost it takes to acquire a customer. And even if you run ads for a month or 2 months and you don't get any customers, what you do is actually find the cost that it's actually going to take to get a customer. It's like paying money for your data. Most people will say ads don't work or nothing happened, I wasted money. But really what you did is find or get closer the cost of what it takes to actually acquire a customer. Now, with that information, it'll allow you to position your offer to make it make sense for how much you have to spend in order to acquire a customer. And if their costs that they spend with you are not offsetting that difference, clearly you have an offer issue. So everything in business or in life, if you reframe it to see the data, basically what you paid for to get this data rather than a loss, you'll actually start to find ways that you can benefit from the money that was wasted. Another thing you need to do is stop self-sabotaging. You need to lean more on self-actualization because self-actualization allows you to learn how to reflect. So next time something goes wrong, you lose a client, you lose a relationship that you thought you wanted, or whatever it may be. The moment you go to self-sabotage, you probably will because you've been wired that way and it's probably your default setting. But after you're done self-sabotaging, do some self-actualization. And over time, every time you sabotage, you're gonna shortlist do actualization. And the more you do that, eventually you're gonna find two distinguishing behaviors that both of those create when you do it. When a bad thing happens, you sabotage. How do I feel? What happens next? You probably lose hope. More bad things happen. And then what happens when you do the actualization? You start finding other ways to walk all of a sudden, just like the Chinese philosophy that we talked about. Missteps are actually directions towards the right step. And the more you do the actualization, the more you're actually able to find pinpoints in your psyche that are limiting beliefs because sabotage is actually a segment of a limiting belief, because when you sabotage something, you're limiting it. And when you actualize something, you're actually breaking limits. You're finding reasons as to why that is not the end. So there are two different things. Sabotage is limiting. Actualization is progression. And I know it's extremely hard to say don't sabotage ever again, which is why I give you the advice: when you're done sabotaging, give the same amount of time to actualization. And over time, you're gonna start realizing, especially if you're a forward-thinking person, that I just feel better when I actualize. I don't really care to sabotage myself. And what's gonna happen is the time that you spend sabotaging yourself is gonna drastically decrease, and the time you spend on the actualization side is gonna start to increase. And over time, sabotage is gonna come down to basically nothing, and the self-actualization is going to fill up most of your space. Once you do that, nothing ever becomes a waste. Everything becomes an input for new datasets, new information that you didn't have previously. What I call raw material for wisdom. And wisdom is one of the biggest virtues in life. In fact, it's referenced in the Bible. The man who seeks wisdom over wealth gets both. Now, if you're interested on self-improvement and business, subscribe to this channel. Because I will continuously give you all of the hardships and filtered out lessons from those hardships on this channel that potentially may help you at any stage you are in life. And if you made it this far, I really appreciate your viewership. Thanks for watching.