How many times do you fail at something before you give up? How many flops before you throw in the towel out of frustration, declaring success impossible or rationalizing the results as inadequate? 1? 100? 10 000?
Truth is, it’s not that difficult to make failure impossible. Let’s make two assumptions about your method:
First: you are constantly altering your approach. You never stop testing modifications, incorporating only the changes that show improvements in your results and discarding those that don’t.
Second: you don’t stop until you reach your goal. This includes ignoring feelings of discomfort or distractions.
If you want something, and apply those two principles, success is inevitable. It is literally impossible that you don’t reach your goal. Maybe it takes a long time or requires a lot of sacrifice* but, in the end, you will have what you want. Throw enough objects in a lake and you won’t need a bridge.
Usually, the first point is not what causes a dream to be unfulfilled. Most people are smart enough to stop bashing their head against a wall after the first few tries and look for a way around. It is actually the second reason that is far and away the more common reason people fail.
Think about the last time you gave up on something. It was for one of the following reasons:
a. You weren’t pursuing something YOU really wanted
There are all kinds of reasons you might have been doing this, such as to fulfill someone else’s expectations. You don’t want to go to law school, but both your parents did, so you submit a half-assed application to get them off your back.
b. You were afraid to succeed
A lot of people are unconsciously afraid to succeed and so keep themselves in a state of failure. You might not want to alienate yourself from your current friends by earning twice their income, so you don’t apply for a fantastic job opportunity you know you are qualified for.
From now on, stop wasting your time and energy on things you won’t succeed at. Before you declare yourself committed to a new goal, consider your personal motivation for the outcome and any reasons you might self-sabotage. If you find anomalies, either handle them first or pursue something else. Whether you spend some time accepting that travelling the world will harm the relationships you have at home or decide friends and family are too important to leave behind, either is preferable to investing your valuable resources (time, money, energy) in an attempt to become location independent that is doomed from the outset.
Chase dreams that YOU believe in, and will go the distance for. It’s foolhardy to do otherwise. If you’re prepared to invest enough to fail once, commit to failing as many times as necessary until you succeed.
*There are ways to optimize your approach and make success quicker or easier, but those are articles for another time.
Read More: 9 Facts You Never Knew About Willpower
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
~ Thomas Alva Edison
Final solution: steal from Tesla.
+1. Swindling, cheating and stealing are very efficient roads to success if you can get away with it.
I can speak on this issue as I have been a lifelong failure at many pursuits.
Add : You lost your nerve before your efforts reached payoff.
Look at the people who are successful. Most of the time they went through a rough patch or hard times. If it wasn’t for that they wouldn’t have the drive to succeed.
The guys you never hear of…they gave up.
Basic stuff.
True about it not being what you really wanted. I’d add that, if it is something that you want and have the patience, then the road to that goal will be more enjoyable because it’s a challenge. It’s more about the journey than the goal.
In my experience, it’s often more about the journey than the goal, especially while traveling. If you don’t stop to smell the roses, you might not find that rose you were looking for all along.
I want to fly unaided by any man-made contraption. Basically I’d like to flap my arms and rise into the air. It’s always been a dream of mine and I’ve been in a permanent state of depression because I thought failure was assured.
BUT WAIT…
“If you want something, and apply those two principles, success is inevitable. It is literally impossible that you don’t reach your goal.”
Yay!
Big wall BASE jumping is exactly that, the sacrifice is great, but so is the reward. Now go get yourself a few years of skydiving experience and your dream is possible. BTDT.
Falling =/= flying.
Au contraire
My original post was a joke (obviously) highlighting setting realistic goals. This squirrel suit breaks the goal’s objective: fly without a man-made contraption.
BUT…
Alright, that’s seriously cool. Yeah, I knew about those squirrel suits before but I didn’t realise people had got so good at them. I am seriously tempted to get one (and an instructor).
Your example does not apply because you completely avoid the First Assumption.
“You are constantly altering your approach.”
Also, your example is intentionally contradictory and thus invalid.
Both “giving up” and “not giving up” are equally important.
Since our time and energy is finite, every thing we do at any given time means we don’t do something else in that time.
Only you can make the assessment if you should continue trying or give up and move on to other things.
Anyone who preaches you values of presistence is trying to use you. Women telling men to “fight for our relationship” and “loves never gives up” comes to mind.
“Anyone who preaches you values of presistence is trying to use you. Women telling men to “fight for our relationship” and “loves never gives up” comes to mind.”
In other words, “you do the heavy lifting while I sit here and decide which dude I’ll go with who remains standing.” Been there, seen that.
“Both ‘giving up’ and ‘not giving up’ are equally important . . .
. . . Only you can make the assessment if you should continue trying or give up and move on to other things.”
Sure, but don’t forget there is a difference between giving up on a method/technique/approach, and giving up on the goal.
Giving up on a method that doesn’t work is smart. Move on to the next one. Giving up on a goal is only smart if you have honestly decided that this goal no longer interests you, or if this goal has since been supplanted by a greater goal. If you give up on a goal you still honestly wish you could achieve, you have failed. If you confuse the goal with the method, you have failed hard.
When you bring up the example of women “preaching persistence” I have to ask – what is the goal here? If SHE is the goal, you’ve already missed the boat. The goal is either short-term (get laid) or long-term (find a suitable partner, a meaningful relationship, a woman to bear your children, etc.) SHE, whomever she may be, is simply the current approach to achieving that goal. If that approach isn’t working, move on, but don’t give up on the greater goal.
Whatever the goal may be, if you find that your method/technique/approach is somehow trying to dictate your actions, i.e., if you find yourself working for the method rather than the method working for you, move on quickly. Drop that method like a hot rock, for it will surely derail you and you will never reach that goal. You will likely be tricked into forgetting the greater goal altogether and instead focus on trying to make some failing method work, as if that was the goal. And THAT is not just the path to failure, it is the path to misery.
“If you give up on a goal you still honestly wish you could achieve, you have failed. If you confuse the goal with the method, you have failed hard.”
Only if YOU believe you have failed. But you can choose not to believe that. Failure is a shaming word meant to manipulate people through their ego.
If you want something try for it. If you get it, its ok. If not, that’s ok too. One can’t have everything one wishes and wishes never end, life ends.
Maybe not having goals can be the goal. Question everything.
Maybe not having goals is the road to mediocrity. That’s okay too, if you want to talk yourself out of achievement. If you want to live in a world where there are no winners or losers, only people who try and don’t care about the outcome. If you want kids who play T-ball where everyone gets to bat and everyone gets a trophy.
But if that’s the case, I don’t think R.O.K. is going to have any useful advice for you, because I don’t think that’s what this place is about. It was my understanding that R.O.K. is the place for masculine men who wish to rise above the rest and learn from others how to set goals and achieve them, how to learn what it takes to win, not how to rationalize failure and convince oneself that this is acceptable.
You make your own reality.
Do what works for you. There’s no right or wrong way to be. Just keep in mind that you don’t have to keep playing if you hate the game. You can just stop.
Don’t let anyone shame you by calling you failure or mediocre.
Failure has nothing to do with what anyone else thinks, or what anyone else calls you. If this is your hang-up, you are still missing the point.
Failure is not subjective.
You set goals, and you either attain them, or you do not. There is no grey area there. YOU set the goals. YOU evaluate your own progress. It sounds like you have been chasing goals set by other people, and allowing yourself to be shamed by what other people think of your progress.
Stop being a pussy and be a fucking man. Or don’t, it makes no difference to me. But the longer you try to pretend you are something you are not, the more pathetic you appear to an objective observer.
You wrote “If you want something try for it. If you get it, its ok. If not, that’s ok too.”
Only a complete fucking pussy would be say this.
Best wishes and good luck to you. I doubt in real life I will ever run into you, it sounds like we have completely different objectives in life. Nothing wrong with that. Enjoy.
You have clearly made your own reality and I sincerely hope it works out for you. But it sure as hell is not my reality, and never will be.
“Failure is not subjective.”
It is. You can subjectively decide not to define lack of results as failure. Or not. Its all in how you define failure and success. You define and no one else.
“You set goals, and you either attain them, or you do not. There is no grey area there. YOU set the goals.”
Or don’t. You don’t have to set goals. You have the freedom not to set goals and not listen to society.
“the more pathetic you appear to an objective observer.”
I care not about others’ opinions. By the way i hope you realize “objective observer” is an oxymoron.
“Stop being a pussy and be a fucking man.”
“Only a complete fucking pussy would be say this.”
Now you are just getting frustrated and reacting like a woman by throwing ad hominem and I don’t discuss philosophy with women.
Good luck to you.
I am enjoying the entertainment, thank you.
You keep digging yourself deeper, and although we are here to help, we cannot help the helpless.
You write, “You have the freedom to not to set goals and not listen to society.”
Again, what makes you think society has anything to do with YOUR goals? Yes, you have the freedom to not set goals. You also have the freedom to set them, and seek to attain them. Why are you referencing society? Unless you have been conditioned to give a shit what society thinks of you, unless you think society is the source of your goals? It is not. You are. Only you. Stop blaming society. That’s not the attitude of the successful people I know. Successful people never blame society for anything that they have not achieved. That last statement is neither speculation, nor ad hominem attack; it is the plain objective truth. Go ahead and argue with it. The truth does not fail to be true, regardless of whether it is observed or accepted.
And no, I don’t realize that “objective observer” is an oxymoron. Please enlighten us all. It isn’t, and I can hardly wait to hear what convoluted logic you will invoke to suggest that it is.
Failure is only subjective if you seek to meet someone else’s standards. If you set your own goals, and evaluate your own progress, failure is never subjective. To suggest otherwise is evidence that you are still struggling to defend a failing position.
If you set a goal to run a 5k in under 30 minutes, and you do not, you have failed to meet your goal. Nothing at all subjective about that. To argue otherwise is completely retarded. If you are going to blame society and suggest that you should not be expected to run a 30 minute 5k, that’s your problem. Nobody made you — YOUR goals, YOUR evaluation of progress. Don’t make goals because of society, and don’t blame society if you fail.
Please, enlighten us all some more with your philosophy of failure and success. Perhaps I have simply misunderstood you.
“Yes, you have the freedom to not set goals. You also have the freedom to set them, and seek to attain them.”
So you agree, having goals and not having goals are equally valid positions.
“Failure is only subjective if you seek to meet someone else’s standards. If you set your own goals, and evaluate your own progress, failure is never subjective.”
Failure is always subjective. It depends on being defined by someone. You or someone else. Taking from your example, one can define failure as taking longer than 30min for 5k, or you can choose not to have a goal in the first place ie. you just show up if you want to run till you feel like and stop when you want to. Like a king.
You are free both to set goals and thus define failure or not. Both are valid positions. Furthermore you are free to stop pursuing goals at any time which are no longer worth the effort.
That is true freedom.
Well I am glad to learn that I have not misunderstood you.
Enjoy your life without goals, and the reality you have made for yourself in which it’s okay to try for something and it doesn’t matter if you get it, where the words “subjective” and “objective” don’t mean the same thing that’s written in everyone else’s dictionary. A life in which your philosophy of freedom and achievement is guided by a fear of being shamed by society and consequently the beta reaction that to avoid this you can do whatever you want, refuse to be accountable for your failures and pretend to be a king while under the delusion that somehow freedom means you are not going to play anyone else’s game but instead make up your own game that nobody else plays and sit in a corner by yourself playing it.
It sounds like you have created the perfect reality for someone like you. Enjoy it.
Life’s good. Thanks.
I’m an engineer, so my job is to create new systems or make some components work together. Quite often, they don’t want to. I’ll start with some plan of how this component and that component will work together to meet some requirement, then find out there’s some reason it can’t work that way. Sometimes the fix is fairly straight forward, but it’s very common for the problem to be a real ass kicker.
I’ve found that if I am persistent, and just keep thinking of different approaches, (replace a component with something similar, add another component to compensate for whatever component feature didn’t work the way I expected, adjust the letter of the requirement while still meeting it in spirit), then I can usually find a way to make it work.
Sometimes it really comes down to guts and perseverance and 90 hour weeks, but I find I can make things work when others would have failed. I can’t tell you how many times I been hours from the deadline, with a system that doesn’t work after a dozen attempts at a solution, then I try one more thing, and it works. The old saying about necessity as the mother of invention is true, but if so, then the father is perseverance.
I’ve found this same principle applies to all aspects of life.
And when has the last great technological leap been? Since the late 60’s tech has been about ever greater and greater refinements of the previous great accomplishments of great men. Now we have cubicle monkeys who think by straining their assholes ever harder they are going to produce a gold briquette. Whatever happened to the polymaths and the innovators? They got sucked into apathy and the 9 to 5. Necessity is not the mother of invention because humans need nothing more than the average mammal. I am sure plenty of stone age men thought that by constantly refining the spear for throwing they were going to make the next leap in hunting technology until some jerk produced the first spear. Perseverance is the father of suckers, there are no complex angles to life.
The next technological leaps are already happening, and it’s coming from blending eastern and western sciences with knowledge of the heart-mind connection. The Descartian premise is fundamentally flawed and the Western world’s state is proof that reason divorced from soul creates inner chaos that manifests in the physical world. Biofeedback, energy medicine, meditation, ecstatic dance, wise psychedelic use to unlock potential in our DNA, sustainable initiatives – these are some new technologies that were no doubt known at least in part by the Greeks, Egyptians, Mayans and their progenitors.
Here is a powerful technology that ties heart and mind together, cardiac coherence (Institute of Heartmath and Complete Coherence are two companies I’m aware of in this field):
Not every recent innovator was subsumed into the mire of the 9-5. There are many examples if you look around. Probably like many reading these articles, I was also that worker bee. It took fortune and great pain to awaken more inner knowing express the deepest truths I can.
If you were Themistocles, you would have partaken in the Eleusinian Mysteries and know what Plato, Socrates and other great philosophers did, without the cynicism.
Perhaps it’s time for another gram of psilocybin! 😉
Bullshit.
complete bullshit
Just what I needed to hear! Thanks for the encouragement.
Want to get smarter and more creative? Grow some brain cells, make more neutral connection instead of destroying them with alcohol and nicotine? Take a psychedelic in a safe, informed manner. Research proves what shamans, native cultures and visionaries have known all along – measured doses of psilocybin increase brain cells. Research also proves alcohol destroys brain cells (google Daniel Amen’s TED talk or any # of sources). As a scientist, which compound makes more sense to investigate? Which one is legal, and why do you think that is?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRNSEG1DY2s&feature=youtu.be
Want precedent?
Crick realized the structure of DNA while on acid.
Descartes while whoring and warring across Europe had an revelatory dream where an angel spoke to him.
Integrating mind, heart and soul is the only way to return to a sane relationship with the world. The technological model divorced from wisdom is destructive.
A REAL scientist does not dismiss anything as bullshit out of turn. That’s what a zealot does. It’s what a dictator does. Fear, emotion, reaction, irrationality under the context of some imagined intellectual authority. Negative comments on a website only provide more motivation to do what I can to understand and improve myself, allowing me to better engage with the world.
This is what a true King would do.
this is a layman interpretation at best, work in the scientific sector and you’ll see there are great technological leaps roughly every 5-10 years. optimisation is the name of the game.
i have colleagues who work in cern, the precursor to world wide web, improvements in optical fibres, condensed matter physics and circuit electronics, quantum computing,everything they have is minimum 10 years ahead of the game. i could name half a dozen great discoveries over just the last 10 years.
here’s the thing, sure there are less notable singular einsteins, but specialisation in STEM academia has helped us propel incredibly into the future regarding discoveries. stuff that would be unfunded in a libertarian economy [i personally love the philosophy but a lot of progress besides the incremental come from blue sky projects. ie. projects where you accidentally discover or invent a tool as part of a way to answer a question.] companies would not fund these types of projects as they do not give a definitive predictable return on profits. they are the black swans of the world, small super high impact gambles which is actually what causes the biggest global benefit.
there are less renaissance men [but they still exist, my prof was most definitely one of them] but technology wise we are the best we have ever been
culturally we’ve descended into madness but its stupid to hark back to victorian era centuries as the pinnacle of the scientific movements and technological prowess
Good article, and great comment. When I was studying in school I tended to give up on homework problems that were challenging to me (answers / path not immediately obvious). That would come back to haunt me in terms of problem-solving and creative thinking for ‘life at large.’ Took decades including starting my own technical business until I started to feel the payoff of perseverance.
Curiously, I now work/play/create in a field I didn’t directly study in school but could apply my physics/math training to. Abandoning fixed attitudes (including “I can’t do it”) are crucial to success and satisfaction. I feel like quite a maverick in what I do but the results make it worthwhile.
As even a steaks, once cooked, needs to rest a moment to achieve the perfect taste, our lives benefit from sustained engagement, fired by curiosity, with periods of reflection to savor our success.
Good article, and great comment. When I was studying in school I tended to give up on homework problems that were challenging to me (answers / path not immediately obvious). That would come back to haunt me in terms of problem-solving and creative thinking for ‘life at large.’ Took decades including starting my own technical business until I started to feel the payoff of perseverance.
Curiously, I now work/play/create in a field I didn’t directly study in school but could apply my physics/math training to. Abandoning fixed attitudes (including “I can’t do it”) are crucial to success and satisfaction. I feel like quite a maverick in what I do but the results make it worthwhile.
As even a steaks, once cooked, needs to rest a moment to achieve the perfect taste, our lives benefit from sustained engagement, fired by curiosity, with periods of reflection to savor our success.
If a goal is achievable without failure, it’s too easy of a goal and nowhere near one’s potential.
I’m convinced that this notion of men who are afraid to succeed is exaggerated. I would say half of men who seem this way are not actually afraid to succeed, they simply have never been allowed to fail properly. They remain in a state of moderate failure, looking for people who would expose their failure. Finding a friend who exposes your failures is like finding gold in snow in the developed world we live in now. A true man welcomes constructive failure because it is the only way he can grow. In the world of the feminine he unfortunately has look very hard to find it because no one is allowed to fail in a feminized world.
Indeed. On the other hand, it takes a certain kind of man to have the balls and tact to point out failure to the one who has failed — constructive criticism. But, then again, the one who has failed has to have the balls to accept the criticism for what it is.
This generation, truly, hasn’t had too many chances to fail, so they haven’t developed resilience.
this is so apt i’m saving this quote
If i’m about to give up on something but my conscience tells me i’m being a pussy then i stick with it. There is a time and place for a “brilliant fighting retreat”, of course.
Thanks for writing this article. That gave me a wake-up call to actively pursue my dreams, and the mindset that “success is inevitable” plus adapting and not stopping just fuels my brain to do the impossible(improbable as of now).
Failure is not an option. Real men don’t give up.
Addendum:
C. Laziness, complacency, discouragement.
A wide reason for downfall. My personal biggest of the 3.
Addendum:
C. Laziness, complacency, discouragement.
A wide reason for downfall. My personal biggest of the 3.
Three fucking years I been taking economic shots to the face. I was over the cliff and hanging on by a fingernail.
And today, the hugest opportunity came, to develop a massive system. After 3 fucking years, at 57 years of age, when it looked as dark as dark could be, the potentially biggest thing to happen for me in 10 years came through.
Never give up. Never.
This forum, the advice on this forum, the men on this forum, in this manosphere, have been a source of energy, revitalization, inspiration, training and the source of recreation and revitalization to me and for me. It is “filios” at its finest.
I am not what I could nor what I should be, but thanks to what we do here, I am not what I was.
It ain’t the getting knocked down.
It’s the getting back up.
And motherfuckers, thanks for the hand.
Kudos. I have been been slogging to find a job for over a year. It is difficult dealing with ageism. I am vacating my environment this week in the hope that relocating will reset my buttons. This site is great for men and women. I have learned much.
This article speaks directly to me. I’ve struggled during my life to reach goals I’ve never really wanted, in order to please others, and as a result I’ve ended accomplising almost none of them and feeling like a huge failure and believing success was impossible for me. On the other hand, once I started pursuing something I really desired, and I became persistent, all obstacles gradually became irrelevant and success was inevitable.
And fear of success is a bitch. It’s a contradictory mindset that holds you back and complicates reaching even your most desired goals. I think it has to do with leaving behind comfort, some people are not ready or willing to leave behind their comfortable loser life and start succeeding, due to the effort and sacrifices involved.
Well timed post for me personally. Great job.
I really needed this after feeling down about online dating on OKC. No real responses and a bunch of flakes for a while. Today I’ve set up a double date with me and my friend and gotten some other numbers.
Even if you finally succeeded in a goal, if the amount of time and effort put into the endevor is more than the benefits acquired then it is a failure. You can learn from failure and improve on it but, that will never make success inevitable, it only means your odds are slightly better this time.