Increase Your Failure Rate to Increase Your Success Rate

To be successful you have to increase your rate of failure. The problem is that many people have a deep-rooted aversion to failure. They are striving for perfection but let's consider whether or not perfection is indeed a worthy ideal.

Regarding success Earl Nightingale said:

"Success is the progression of a worthy ideal."

However, the quest for perfection is an unrealistic goal because it is unachievable.

"We let perfect get in the way of possible. Nothing's perfect but we keep looking for it and when we don't find it we do nothing."
Keith Cunningham

On this basis the pursuit of perfection isn't a worthy ideal because it often causes us not to take action at all. So we end up in a state where we are not pursuing any form of goal and we lose out on the chance of achieving true success.

If we could just accept that to be successful is to fail and fail often we could get over our fear of failure and get on with the pursuit of success.

You often hear that someone is an overnight success but when someone achieves extraordinary success we sometimes zero in on their success and neglect reflecting the path they travelled in order to achieve that success. Along the way there would have been many spectacular failures.

However, they didn't allow these failures to define them. They may have failed but they didn't see themselves as a failure. They simply saw their failures as experiences from which they could learn from and they kept striving towards their goal until they achieved success.

At first the measure of success they achieve may be small. However, they seek to build upon their success by increasing what they did that resulted in their initial success.

They also continually strive to improve what they do. They don't strive for perfection.

They strive for mastery.

And, in their quest to master their skills, they are willing, even eager to make mistakes. They realise that at the heart of ever mistake is an invaluable lesson.

They are also happy to perform poorly at first because they place greater emphasis on getting the task done than getting it done perfectly. If necessary, they later go back and refine what they initially did but often they already have their sights set on even bigger goals.

By adopting a process of testing and improving these individuals continually move towards their worthy ideal and are successful.

When you achieve mastery of something your level of awareness is heightened to such a degree that you are able to identify small distinctions in how you execute a particular task. Now although the distinctions themselves may be small, the effect on your results can be astounding.

These distinctions help you to stand out from the crowd and just one distinction can literally make you a fortune.