You’re going to make mistakes. That’s just what happens.
If you are human and try, you’re going to fail. Which means you’re going to hurt people, disappoint others, and leave results that are less than stellar in a trail behind you.
The secret to success is to learn from your mistakes. To stop the cycle that caused you to make them in the first place.
While that sounds easy and obvious, the truth is it’s not automatic. It is mostly problematic.
It’s usually more painful for you to change then it is to experience the negative consqeunces of failure.
Isn’t that crazy?
Subconsciously you’re willing to experience unnecessary regret, loss, pain, frustration, and emotional torture rather than invest the awkwardness and energy in trying something new. In doing something that could radically accelerate your personal progress.
So what do you do to change that automatic response? You remind yourself of what’s important.
When faced with the decision not to change, you remind yourself of the consequences of that decision. You have to make the stakes all-or-nothing.
It has to be that you’re willing to die trying rather than just to go through the motions and hope that something accidentally works.
What you do right now can’t be about how you feel right now.
Your behavior has to be future-focused. Targeted specifically at what you so desperately want to achieve.
It’s easy to make bad decisions because you’re weak in the moment. You’re not thinking about what’s going to come down the line. You just want whatever is in front of you right now to go away.
Learn from your mistakes. Use each bad experience as motivation to improve.
You won’t ever be perfect. But you can get better.
And that, at its very core, is the secret to achieving success.