This is Why you Aren’t Successful…Yet

It’s a simple lesson. Today, the people that you look up to are only there because they’re standing atop a larger pile of failures than you. That’s it. Listen, let me say that again. I think it’s so deeply and profoundly true, not true in every situation, but true in enough situations that it can really reframe how we approach the act of execution, of doing, of showing up on a long enough timeframe and doing things in pursuit of our greatness, in pursuit of success, of whatever, in whatever way that is that you define it. So let me say this again. The people you look up to, the people who are above you, they’re only there because they are standing atop a larger pile of failures than you. Now, there’s another quote that’s very similar to this, which is that the master has failed more than the amateur has even tried.

Tried, or more than the beginner has even tried. This is one of the most powerful truths that I have come to accept in my own life when it comes to pursuing the big, meaningful, audacious goals of my life, which is that everything worth doing, every success worth achieving, is on the other side of an immense amount of failures. I like to think of failure and success as being two sides of the same coin. And it’s a coin that’s weighted, it’s a magical coin, so that in the beginning, when you’re a beginner, you flip that coin, you’re not very good. You don’t have the skills, you don’t have the experience or the repertoire yet to be able to execute the thing. And so that coin, in the beginning, when you’re flipping it, it lands on failure and failure and failure 99% of the time. But every now and then, you get lucky. The ball goes in the hoop.
Every now and then, you hit the right note, right? That is the path of the beginner now with time, because this is a magic coin. Every time you flip it, every repetition you go through, every failure you achieve or you unlock, you change the balance of that coin. And so now it moves ever so slightly, 0.01%, and becomes more likely that the next time you flip it, it’s going to be a success. And so now it’s 98.99% likely to land on failure. But the more you flip it, the more you flip it, the more you flip it, the more the odds shift in your favor and you start succeeding more frequently. So that the master, by the time he has flipped that coin 100,000 times, he has changed his probability of success. It’s no longer 99.9% certain he’s going to fail. Now it’s only 18% certain he’s going to fail.
18% certainty is going to look a whole lot different than 99%. But he only got there because he’s flipped the coin so many times. Often when we’re embarking on a journey of self improvement and self discovery, learning a new skill, trying a new thing, building a business, we underestimate how long it’s going to take, how difficult the path is going to be, how many failures it’s going to require of us to finally attain the success success. And one of the things that can be the most debilitating, the most poisoned of fruits is to find success too early on the journey, and it can trick you into believing that this is the norm. So this is what I believe the casinos call. Or they have a process of intermittent reinforcement, which is in the beginning when you’re playing, say, a slot machine, coded so that you’re going to be reinforced for pulling that lever more frequently in the beginning. So the time between, you know, stimuli and reward is short in the beginning, but as it starts to program you with each one of those successes, now the time between successes can lengthen because now you have the ability to sustain the focus and to keep doing the exercise, keep executing the activity longer and longer. You’re willing to wait longer and longer for the reward because you’re starting to be programmed for it until it gets to the point where you can go very, very long periods of time and you’re just.
You’re still so seeking of that dopamine that you keep playing the game. So that’s how intermittent reinforcement can breed addiction. Right. It’s the same thing, except for in reverse when it comes to real life. Right. The successes, they don’t come very frequently in the very, very beginning. They actually take much longer to get to in the beginning. And then over time, as you keep doing it, the successes get shorter and shorter and shorter until it gets to the point where you’re succeeding far more often than you’re failing.
Right. But because it’s an inverse of the first scenario, like the scenario that is very addictive, that casinos use, that social media uses, this is the reason why most people don’t stick to the journey long enough to find the big, meaningful successes in their business or in their life. It’s because that first reinforcement point and like, how often the reinforcement in the beginning is so few and far between. And so I share this with you because I think so often the discontent we experience in life is simply the result of our miscalibrated expectations. And if we can come into an activity more closely aligned with what the reality of the situation is going to be, with how much work it’s actually going to take for us to be able to realize the fruits of our labor, then I think it makes it easier to show up consistently and do the work. If you think that you’re going to find success by only putting out, say, content once a day for the next 30 days, and you’re going to find success, you’re going to be very disappointed at the end of that 30 days when you realize, oh, I haven’t made any progress. But if you come at it and you say, I’m going to put out a single piece of content every single day for the next thousand days, well, you’ve stretched your expectations. You’ve lengthened the time horizon upon which you expect to find success.

As a result. I would be very, very shocked if after a thousand days of consistently putting out high quality content that continually improves and adds value to your audience, that you aren’t in a demonstrably better place. I would reckon after a thousand days of that, your life, your business, would look unrecognizably different for the better. And so I wanted to share this with you today because it’s something I think about a lot when it comes to comparing ourselves and thinking about other people and, like, putting them up on this pedestal, just recognize every single person that you look up to. They only got there because they’re standing atop a larger pile of failures than you. Take that as inspiration and go forth, my friend, and fail wildly. Good luck, guys. I’ll see you in the next episode.