Trial and Error

Let’s take a deep dive into failure: deep, dark, endless failure. Feeling stuck, with no way out in sight. Well, we've all been there. Ultimately, there is a way out of this spiritual quicksand, but it's up to us. We can play the victim or the hero with our career. We all get slammed down, but letting it keep us down is the failure

I can speak about this from personal experience. I have failed so many times in my life that I almost welcome failure. Obviously, I don't want to fail at everything, but if I fail at something, it doesn't phase me. I don't really care what people think.

I had an agent last week come to me, hitting rock bottom and feeling lost, and ask me how I do it. How Cindy and I keep moving forward and going for it. Honestly, I wish it was simple. In my case, the path to success never reveals itself. I just have to keep banging and going for it.

The path to success is me getting a shit ton of stuff wrong so that I can figure out what I’m doing right. Trial and error.

Trial means change, and error means failure. And those two words send a lot of people running for the hills.

Trial, or change. In order for me to go, I have to keep trying new things all the time. Every single day I’m alive, I seek to learn or try something new, moving a few inches away from where I am. I am allergic to being stationary.

If I'm trying new things it goes without saying that I'm going to fail at an awful lot of them, which has been the case for me. I failed a shit ton of stuff. People ask me how I figure things out, especially all these social techniques.

It’s because I explore every single thing there is out there. In order for me to explore, I have to fail. Failure is attached to ego, because people care what others think when they fail. I just don’t care.

I take it on the chin.

Every decision I make either brings me closer to or further away from my goal. But the key is remaining in action. If I'm not running, even if it's running in the wrong direction, I'm stationary. I'm stagnant. Nothing happens. I don't grow professionally. I don't grow spiritually. I don't grow in any way, shape, or form.

The key to not getting in your own head, I've learned this from my lovely wife, Cindy, is: speed. Speed is the key. What we do is we tend to shoot out an email, or make a phone call, or strike up a relationship, and then we think about it and we ponder about it for a while and waste precious time.

One thing that Cindy and I have done from the get-go is action, then move on. We don't ponder the result, which might sound counterintuitive. Speed of communication is everything. My beautiful tiny little Asian wife is a ninja when it comes to response time, and I believe that's a very large part of why we did so well. She responds quickly and never overthinks.

Back to the agent I mentioned earlier. She was feeling lost and at the end of her rope. And that’s when it clicked. She stopped caring what others thought. She went for it, and she was hungry.

She is someone I relate to. She's a creative. She was racked by insecurity. She was racked by self-doubt. She was immobilized by self-induced fear, and then that all got shattered. She removed expectations. She removed ego. She removed what people thought. She removed all of the consequences of her actions other than moving in the right direction. Close the deal. Opening another month.

It’s not just about deals and money, but when we get out of our own way, we succeed. The enemy is within. That's what I have always found. My worst enemy is me.

When you're sick and tired of being sick and tired of not getting where you want to go, smash the glass. Smash the glass and try again. You can mold and remold and change until you get it right. When you are spending your time on horse shit, farting around, and going on frigging Amazon at two in the afternoon, you are just eroding your career.

Work. Work ethic. Trial and error. Change. Action. Speed. Those are the words of the day.