Failure is the Way

I’ve spent the last year being my own most effective gatekeeper.

I’ve had this recurring thought that it’s hard to be rejected when people don’t even know you’re there. There is a specific kind of safety in silence; a fear that if people were to actually see my creations, they might turn them away. It feels easier to stay quiet because the world can’t reject what it doesn't see. That song, that course, that program, they might be greatness in waiting, but I’ll never know because the people who could be impacted by them don’t even know they exist.

For me, the struggle isn't in the craft. I feel masterful when I am buried in the activity of creating; building courses, recording podcasts, developing AI applications. But my weakness is in the "putting myself out there." Instead of doing what really needs to be done, going to companies and saying, "I believe this can help your team," or asking friends and family to work with me, I bury myself in the busyness of more content. I create my own default rejection the moment I decide not to release my work.

As Wayne Gretzky famously said, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Today, I realized I’ve been guarding the goal against my own puck.

I have many life experiences that show me that when I put myself out there, I’m often not listened to. I’ll do one grand gesture, post it in front of people, and when I receive little feedback, I decide it’s not worth the effort. It scares me to network. It scares me to reach out. So I go to my defaults: I justify not acting, and then I sit on the sideline complaining that I’m not being discovered. But the rejection isn't coming from them; it’s a self-generated inoculation. We often inoculate ourselves with the very sickness we are afraid of getting, rejecting ourselves first because it feels "softer" than letting someone else do it.

But nature doesn’t work on guarantees; it works on repetitions. An oak tree lays 10,000 acorns a year just so one might become a tree. The sea turtle lays a thousand eggs in a lifetime so one might reach adulthood. Only a billionth of the sun’s energy ever hits the Earth, yet that tiny fraction sustains all life. None of them stop releasing their energy into the world just because 99% of it doesn't "succeed." Nature knows it isn't there for the 99% failure; it is there for the 1% success.

History is written by those who were willing to fail in public. Thomas Edison didn't fail 1,000 times; he simply found 1,000 ways that didn't work before the light bulb finally flickered to life. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because he "lacked imagination." Harland Sanders was rejected 1,009 times before someone bought into KFC, and James Dyson went through 5,126 failed prototypes before he changed the world. As Winston Churchill noted, "Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."

I used to wait for the "feeling" of confidence before I moved. I was wrong. Courage isn't the absence of fear, it’s the "bubble guts" and the anxiety that tells you you’re finally standing at the edge of your old patterns. It is the most challenging thing we can do to put ourselves in a situation that might cause rejection, but nothing says we have to feel "good" to move forward. In fact, fear is the only environment where courage can actually exist.

Today is a commitment to take one shot. One step. One action. One failure at a time. I am stopping the automation of "not trying." We all live in our repeated behaviors, and what we repeat becomes our identity. If I automate "not trying," I am 100% guaranteed to fail. But if I try, even if only 1% of my efforts pay off, that 1% is what matters most.

If you’ve been hiding in your own busyness, consider this your mirror. You don’t need a grand gesture. You just need to stop rejecting yourself by your thoughts of them rejecting you.

Take the shot. Release the song. Post the book. Fail your way forward. The 1% is worth every failure it took to get there.

#SelfRejection #FailForward #My12Journeys #Entrepreneurship #Courage