If You’ve Given Up On Your Dreams — Read This!

Failure isn’t permanent. (Unless you stop trying).

Do you have a dream nagging at you? Chasing you? Haunting you?

Has it been around for a while, lurking in the shadows, occasionally daring to pop its head into the light for a rare, fleeting exposure?

Or have you furtively turned your head and kept trudging along the rutted path you call home?

Let’s change that. Right here, right now.

Because the most important thing to get in your head is this:

Your Dreams Are Possible!

Impossible is I’M POSSIBLE!

But if you’re like most people who have dreams gasping for air, you’ve probably given up because you’ve felt there was no way to get there. It’s depressing to have such powerful drives inside, and then feel as though they can never be fulfilled!

Yet there is much wisdom in the saying: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!

My try, try again.

I was just 15 years old, and I was at a middle school Halloween party. I had spent a lot of time making a Merlin wizard costume, and I was quite proud of it. It looked killer! The deep blue hat was tall and pointy, with stars and moons on it, and the white beard just perfect!

It was hot at the party, so I took off my wizard hat and beard.

I noticed everyone forming a circle and walking around the edge of the room, so I joined in. What was going on?

Then I realized they were judging for “best costume.” Before I knew it, I had passed by the judges — and they had passed me over!

I was mad. I knew I had a shot at winning, so I put my hat back on, donned the beard, and cut across the circle to go through the judging line again.

That time, I won! Well, co-won, with another guy.

By all rights I had lost, but because I dug down and believed in myself, and I knew my costume was great, I took action and tried again — and won!

Now let’s talk about you.

• What action do you want to try again?
• Whose judgements did you accept as final, and you stopped trying for something you wanted?
• What’s the worst thing that could happen if you did take action and didn’t get the results you wanted?
• How would you feel if you accomplished your goal?
• How would you feel if you gave up and never tried again? Would you feel regret?

Maybe You’ve Had Failures Already

If so — great!

Yes, GREAT!

Every “wrong” step you take, every so-called “misstep,” is one more thing you’ve done that hasn’t worked. When confronted with having failed to invent the light bulb for his first 2000 attempts, Thomas Edison said, “I didn’t fail 2000 times. I just found 2000 ways how lightbulbs don’t work.”

Every step you’ve taken to invent your “lightbulb” has been just that: a way how not to achieve your dream. Check it off, and do it differently next time.

“NEXT!”

From now on, adopt this mindset:

Failure is R&D

I love this quote:

Fail forward faster.

Or another variation:

Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Forward!

In truth, there is no such thing as failure, because success has no end point. If you haven’t yet figured something out, there’s always tomorrow.

The only way you can truly fail is to give up—and I stress this point — never try again.

So give up 100X. Fall down until you’re so frustrated you can’t see straight.

But it’s not failure until you decide not to get up again.

How long would you give your average baby to walk?

Tony Robbins posed this question in one of his motivational speeches. He asked, if a baby doesn’t walk after 1 year, do you prevent it from trying? Or do you encourage it to walk, and teach it, until it walks?

Of course — you give that baby infinite chances to learn to walk, and never see falling down as failure.

So why do we do this to ourselves?

Some people stop just one failure short of success.

Rome wasn’t built in a day

Sometimes we give up on our dreams because they aren’t happening fast enough. Especially in this culture of instant gratification, we expect massive achievement in nanoseconds.

In many ways, our technology culture fails us, creating unrealistic expectations about what success looks like. You might have heard the expression “it took ten years to become an overnight success.”

That’s because some things just take time.

You can try “speed gardening” if you want to — but I promise you, the plants will not grow any faster by you digging the holes deeper, watering more than they need, or giving them extra supplements.

If you’re plodding away at your dream, but it’s taking longer than you’d like, maybe it’s just something that takes time. Research it and see if there’s ways to speed things up. If not, keep going!

Know When to Walk Away

Now I’m going to say something counterintuitive:

Sometimes you win by losing.

One of the hardest lessons is to realize someone or something isn’t right for you, and have the guts to walk away.

And it’s not always obvious when this comes into play.

What you absolutely do not want to do is use this as an excuse not to try — that’s lame! Try with 10,000 watts of gumption. Use every fiber of muscle in your body. Harness every trick in the book, and for god’s sake, don’t stop until you win!

Unless you realize, from that still, small voice inside, that perhaps this isn’t the ladder you should be climbing.

When in doubt, tune into that still, small voice inside you, and you’ll know what to do. If the voice tells you to walk away, then find another dream, another goal, another person, another joy to pursue, and by golly don’t stop until you’re successful!

The Biggest Regret of Dying People

The saddest comments from people on their deathbeds is never about what they did in life — it’s about what they didn’t do. The places they didn’t go, the times they chickened out and didn’t reach out to someone, the risks they didn’t take.

Give your future self the joy of giving 100% effort for what matters to you. Go for your dreams and use failure for what it really is: a learning experience to help you get to the next step. And listen to the still, small voice. It will guide you unerringly.

You deserve a life well-lived.