3244: Is Failure Good? by James Altucher on Self Improvement & Personal Development

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[00:00:58] That's wonderfulpistachios.com. This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 3244, Is Failure Good? by James Altucher of jamesaltucher.com and I'm Justin Mollick, your personal narrator and I'll get right to our next post as we optimize your life. Is Failure Good? by James Altucher of jamesaltucher.com.

[00:01:27] Failure is not good. Failure is the worst thing possible. You feel sick. You feel like you're going to die. You feel like if you don't die, you might kill yourself. There's absolutely nothing good about failure. There's nothing you can pretend to learn from failure. Lately we've

[00:01:44] been living in the golden age of failure. Everyone wants to share their story. Everyone wants to fail forward. You can't learn anything from failure because don't forget that every single moment in

[00:01:56] your past has added up to that one moment in your present where you are lying on the floor moaning your painful and abysmal failure. Stop whining and stop using the word failure. Here are better

[00:02:10] things to learn from. Failure has many cousins. Learn from one of the cousins. Curiosity. When something happens and you don't understand why, then ask why. Keep asking questions. Clearly something confusing happened. Ask and ask and ask. Guess what will happen? You will get answers.

[00:02:33] Experiment. Sometimes people say Thomas Edison failed 999 times before he finally came up with the light bulb on the 1000th try. This is a total lie. It is normal in a lab to experiment with many

[00:02:48] materials before coming up with the right one. Oh, your experiment didn't work? Okay, change something and let's try a new experiment. Persistence. I get asked how do I market my book or my app?

[00:03:03] Answer, write another book. Write another app. The best way to get better, to get more known, to learn the subtleties of your art or your field or your sport is to simply do it again. Persistence plus love equals abundance. Forgiveness. I used to live in regret. One

[00:03:25] time I sold a business for 15 million dollars. Within two years, I lost almost all of the money. And it wasn't money on paper, it was money in real life. If I tell you how I lost it,

[00:03:37] you would hate me forever. That's okay. But it's not important for this answer. Failure is a word used to label a past event. That's 100% up to you how you label a past event.

[00:03:49] When you label a past event failure, it prevents you from moving beyond the past. You get stuck there. You keep time traveling to the moment of failure under the excuse that there's something

[00:04:01] to learn there. The thing you learn first is forgiveness. Then you move back to the present. Get healthy. Be around people you love. Start being creative again. Study. When you get a question wrong on a test, a good student doesn't call it a failure. It's

[00:04:20] a pointer to one single question wrong on a test. Study a bit more next time and you won't get that question wrong anymore. Understand and study and remember the correct answer. Don't keep living

[00:04:32] in the past where you remember the wrong answer. Athletes always go over their losses. They study videos, go over games, get advice from coaches. The coach doesn't say, here's where you failed. He says, here's where you should turn right instead of left.

[00:04:49] Botvinnik, the world chess champion in the 1950s, noticed he often lost chess games to people who smoked. So he would play practice games against people who would smoke in his face. He didn't say, I fail against smokers. He became the world chess champion because of smokers.

[00:05:08] Failure is not a detail you can learn from. Again, it's a label that describes nothing except a feeling inside of you. Details are what you can study and learn from. Hard problems. The key to

[00:05:22] success is to solve hard problems. Searching the internet is hard. Google does it better than anyone. Making an electric car is hard. Tesla does it better than anyone. Figuring out a market for post-it notes was hard. The inventor tried for over 20 years. Now it's 3M's most successful

[00:05:41] consumer product. Writing a book is hard. Maybe your last book was bad. That's okay, that happens to everyone's first book. Now read a lot of good books so you can solve the hard problem of what

[00:05:54] makes a good book. Then write. Failure is not a hard problem, it's a label. Failure is in the past. Hard problems can be solved right now. Don't care. When I thought I had failed, what I really was

[00:06:10] worried about was would other people think I was a failure? Yes, yes they did. And when I stopped caring about that, when I took the word out of my vocabulary, I suddenly stopped caring what people

[00:06:21] thought. Then what happened? Only good things. My dad failed, he had a company that went bankrupt, he went broke. Then he got depressed, he couldn't stop thinking about the failure. Then he got sick,

[00:06:34] he was always sick because his body broke down from obsessing on the failure. Then he got a stroke. Depression plus stress plus sick equals stroke. Then he never recovered and for two years

[00:06:47] he never moved and could only blank. Then he died. I've started a lot of businesses, some worked, some didn't, over a period of many, many years. Many. I hope I've solved a lot of hard problems.

[00:07:00] Maybe not the best I could have, but I tried. And then tried again. I've slipped on the ice rink and got up. I've cried and wished I were dead, but then I started asking questions. Lots of questions,

[00:07:13] lots of studying, lots of learning. I've never failed. I am still alive. You just listened to the post titled, Is Failure Good? by James Altucher of jamesaltucher.com and I'll be right back with

[00:07:31] my commentary. Thank you to James. An interesting one today, which definitely didn't start as I imagined. Classic James taking a unique approach. Basically he's rewording failure, right? In the example of Thomas Edison working on the light bulb, you can argue that he failed, failed,

[00:07:51] failed again up to 999 times maybe. But as James said, he experimented, experimented some more, and then finally figured it out. So whether you define all the previous work that Edison did before figuring it out as failures, that's up to you. It's all perspective. And all these words or

[00:08:13] little headings he has are really just different ways of describing failure, but with a positive twist. Persistence is what we do despite failing. Forgiveness is what we do, hopefully, when we fail

[00:08:27] or things don't go as planned. Studying is how we learn. Same with solving hard problems. That's how growth happens. And then experimentation? Well I already talked about that with the Edison example. Reframing words is such a simple concept but can actually make a pretty significant difference in

[00:08:47] our lives. It's like the law of attraction or positivity or so many different things we hear about on this show. It's another example of how our own interpretation of events in our lives,

[00:08:59] or even our thoughts, affects our happiness, our success, and more. Just by changing the words we use to describe what happened or ourselves and the world around us, we can completely change the

[00:09:13] direction and where we go in life. It's so simple but not necessarily easy. So try to keep reframing and keeping things positive. Have a great rest of your day and I'll catch you tomorrow, where your optimal life awaits.