How To Not Fail: 15 Tips For Transformational Success
Is it possible to learn how to not fail? Entrepreneur stated that there are more than 600,000 millennial millionaires—and that’s just in the U.S. While making it professionally used to be the least of a young adult’s concerns, failure to achieve massive success early in life can be a staggering weight.
Although failing is a key ingredient of success, it’s easy to ask how to not fail rather than focus on how to succeed.
Billions of individual lives are on social media for the world to see. It’s normal to wonder how others will respond to success or failure. But there’s a catch. This hyper conscientiousness of failure is detrimental to learning how to get into the creative mindset. Creativity is essential for success. So with these factors stacked against you, is there any way to learn how to not fail?
Why do I fail constantly? How not to fail.
If your definition of success is outside your realm of achievability, you will fail on a basis consistent with your goals. Failure relies on a plethora of factors, the key one being one’s definition of success.
Learning how to not fail comes down to the mentality you bring to your attempts.
Carol Dweck’s work on the topics of motivation and mindset show the importance of how thought processes influence behavior. Once you learn the power of a grit and growth mindset your view of failure will change.
Part of learning how to not fail comes down to a mindset shift:
Determine what you want to achieve
Create actionable steps you can take to get there
Define what successfully achieving your goal means
For instance, if you are an aspiring author your goal may be to land a traditional book deal. Your action steps may consist of:
Writing your book
Hiring a writing coach
Querying agents
Querying publishers
Signing a contract
But what if you write your book and go through the above steps but haven’t landed a contract yet? Do you define yourself as a failure for not achieving your goal? Or are you a success because you did everything in your power to achieve your goal, and still choose to continue trying?
A growth mindset is the difference between asking, “why do I fail constantly” and instead asking, “how long does it take to get a book published, for me?”
How do I stop thinking I am going to fail?
Learning tips on how to not fail can greatly aid your mindset and increase your chances of success. Many people are afraid of failure, but fear should not hold us back from achieving our dreams. Courtney Johnson’s Ted Talk, Failure Is Necessary, highlights the importance failure plays in overall success. So while failure may be necessary, there are steps to take to help avoid drastic failure.
15 Tips on how to not fail.
To help you on your journey to success, learn from failure, and ultimately, experience less failure, try these tips.
1. Destroy risk avoidance mentalities
Risk avoidance manifests as playing not to lose rather than playing to win. If you chase after passion and perseverance for long term and meaningful goals, you must destroy this mindset. Rather than focus entirely on the potential risks attached to your pursuit of success, try to conduct your action steps with a focus on the possibility of success.
2. Mitigate the effects of failure
To heighten your chances of ultimate success, lower the impact of failure. While these tips can help you learn helpful tactics on how to not fail, great endeavors usually go hand-in-hand with some form of failure.
Small choices, such as keeping the day job, can give you the confidence you need to go after your dreams. The more you mitigate the impact of your potential failure, the more you give yourself permission to fail when necessary.
3. Surround yourself with inspiring people
John Rohn once said that “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” If you want to learn how to not fail, surround yourself with people who succeed. Developing grit translates into persistence.
Extended persistence in the right direction often brings success.
4. Pursue forward movement over perfection
Train yourself to aspire to continue more than you aspire to continue perfectly. It takes a mix of both talent and intelligence to realize perfection is something to strive for but is not always achievable. Forward movement keeps you on the road toward perfection when you wonder how to not fail in a difficult situation and want to give up.
5. Commit to giving your all
Angela Lee Duckworth presented her breakthrough TED Talk on Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Duckworth defines grit as “passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition.” Wondering how to not fail? Commit to grit.
6. Underpromise and overdeliver
In business, a common rule of thumb is to underpromise to clients and then surprise them by overdelivering. You can apply the same mindset to your pursuit of learning how to not fail:
Create goals that you can succeed in but challenging enough you will grow, and then go beyond.
In one of his many podcasts, Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, dives into how to set and achieve your goals. He stresses the importance of setting goals that stretch you while recognizing that reaching difficult goals can take extra mental stamina.
7. Take advantage of SMART goals
SMART goals are an acronym described as the following:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
To help you learn how to not fail, use the above points when you set goals.
8. Build healthy habits into your daily routine
James Clear authored the bestselling book, Atomic Habits. In his book, Clear stresses the importance of setting small habits that build up to great change. For instance, if you don’t want to fail in your aspirations to run a marathon next year, but your daily diet is anything but nourishing, you either need to change your habits or change your goal. While the importance of grit cannot be overstated, neither can the impact of small, healthy, daily habits.
9. Rest as hard as you work
If you want to succeed long-term, rest needs to play a key role in your routine. The benefits of resting are multifaceted. According to a Forbes article, appropriate rest can help:
Reduce stress
Boost creativity
Improve productivity
Enhance decision making
Resting is crucial to resetting and preparing for your next stretch of work.
10. Recognize that failure can breed humility
Learning how to not fail includes embracing the mindset that failure is not final. In fact, failure teaches important lessons such as resilience, persistence, and humility.
Some of the most successful individuals are the most humble because they went through epic failure on their way to greatness.
11. Invest in learning from those ahead of you
Speaking of successful individuals, no matter what stage of your goal you find yourself, invest in learning from those further down the road. If you’re a writer, you may wonder, “What does a writing coach do?” If you pursue full-time photography, you may wonder how to learn from world-famous photographers.
Whether you can invest in personal coaching or want to simply search the Internet for free educational resources, don’t underestimate the power of learning from those who are well on their way to where you one day hope to be.
12. Track your progress
Track your progress so that when you feel discouraged you can see how far you’ve come. When I was growing up, my family climbed many of the sand dunes along Michigan’s west coast. As a young child, struggling up a sand dune barefoot in the summer sun, I knew I had to keep my eye on the summit.
I encouraged myself to continue by allowing occasional glances at the lake sparkling far below. When sweat ran down my face and my breathing grew heavy, I’d sneak a glimpse to encourage myself in how far I’d come.
In your creative endeavors, take the time to look back. Your progress may pleasantly surprise you.
13. Research the success stories of famous people
You’re in good company if you experience setback after setback. Most overnight success stories overcame failure for years before they reached their goals. Spending a few extra minutes learning about the creative journeys of today’s household names can encourage aspiring artists.
If you’re eager to find success in life but feel frustrated with your slow, forward movement, look at those who came before. You may want to start with a few classic examples: Thomas Edison, J.K. Rowling, and Micheal Jordan.
Each of these individuals learned how to not fail by first failing. Touché? I say it humanizes the journey.
14. Don’t take yourself too seriously
Live your life while pursuing the life of your dreams. There are millions of success stories on individuals who seem to have mastered how to not fail. In reality, they probably didn’t share many of the setbacks online but instead, highlighted the small wins.
The following cliché bears repeating: don’t compare your every day to someone else’s highlight reel.
15. View yourself as the protagonist
I learned this tip from a podcast, book, or interview, but I couldn’t tell you where or who. As a creative writer, the basic idea deeply resonated: Rather than allow yourself to get stuck in a mental blog, imagine you are the protagonist in a fiction that is your life.
Then ask: If you read a book and you were the hero, what would you expect you to do?
For instance, as you learn how to write compelling characters, you grasp the importance of putting characters in situations where failure seems inevitable. Tension mounts to the point where the hero must make a choice. What choice is it? Ideally, the right decision propels them toward their goal. Embody a similar mindset as you decipher how to not fail.
What’s the best choice you can make in the tension you currently experience to push you toward your goal?
Embrace the journey with unbiased optimism.
Embracing the how to not fail mindset ultimately comes down to your perception of failure and definition of success.
Ask yourself the following two questions to see which mindset you naturally lean toward:
Success is achieving the end goal I set out to accomplish.
Success is doing my best to achieve the goal I set for myself.
Similarly, consider the below thought-processes:
Failure is me not meeting the end goal or meeting it in a way that is less than the success I anticipated (Ex: A longer road to success than originally intended)
Failure is me not giving my utmost to pursue the goal, whether or not I reach it.
To bring this home, imagine the following scenario. You set out to traditionally publish a book and launch a full time writing career. You learn the writing rules, invest in a writing coach, and sign with a literary agent who shops your manuscript to fifty publishers. Each publisher rejects your project. Are you a failure because you didn’t meet your end goal?
Three are several ways you can view this:
Yes, I’m a failure. I did everything right for X years and never landed a contract.
No, I succeeded. So far, I’ve done my best and even received some positive comments amidst the rejections. I’ll try fifty more publishers. There’s still time to meet my goal.
The second mindset embraces the journey with unbiased optimism. It recognizes the facts: Fifty rejections and a bit of positive feedback. It also embraces hope for the future: Some positive feedback and opportunity to query more publishers.
Still wondering how to not fail? Practically, trying the above tips can help. But until you exhaust all efforts, it’s your mindset that determines how far you go.
Want help with your mindset? See the following link for resources on how to take charge of your creative passion!
