The 103rd Edition
A failure never tries. A failer keeps trying despite failing.
And eventually, they succeed.
Something to Think About
The people who succeed stop treating failure as a reason to quit.
Something to Ask Yourself
What would you attempt if you knew failure wasn’t something to be embarrassed by?
Personal Lesson
Last week, I made the decision to sunset The Runnable Journal.
For those of you who don’t know, The Runnable Journal was a product I created because I genuinely believed it could help people. I spent time thinking about it, designing it, promoting it, talking about it and trying to get it into the hands of runners.
And it didn’t work.
Granted, it was only live for a few months. Perhaps if I’d kept pushing it for another twelve months things would have been different. But sometimes you don’t need years of data to know something isn’t gaining traction. Sometimes the market’s just telling you, “no thanks.”
We rarely see this side of people’s lives online. We see race medals, business launches, “exciting announcements”, revenue screenshots from online business gurus, PBs and highlight reels.
What we don’t see as much is someone saying:
“I tried something and it failed.”
Well…
The Runnable Journal failed.
Running – Life’s Metaphor
Running teaches us that failure is the process.
You miss sessions. You get injured. You blow up in races. You miss cut-offs. You train for months and don’t get the result you wanted.
Yet somehow we understand this in running better than we do elsewhere. We accept that setbacks are part of becoming a runner, but then expect our careers, businesses, relationships and personal projects to unfold in a perfect upward trajectory.
Life works much more like running than we’d like to admit.
Final Thoughts
I think one of the biggest differences between people who build meaningful things and people who don’t is their relationship with failure.
I know so many capable, intelligent, hard working, unique people who are held back by a fear of looking foolish.
A fear of launching something that nobody buys.
Of posting something that nobody likes.
Of showing their true self in case that version of them gets rejected.
Once you become afraid of failure, you start organising your life around avoiding it.
You stop taking risks and only do things that guarantee a reasonable outcome.
This is what I like to call EGO PROTECTION. And protecting the ego only ever limits your potential.
If you live an ambitious life, you will fail. Repeatedly.
If you bet on the wrong thing, get rejected, laughed at, spend time and energy on things that don’t work, create things that no one sees…
That’s evidence that you’re truly participating.
So if something isn’t working for you right now, if you’ve invested yourself into something that hasn’t paid off, don’t be too quick to judge yourself.
Own it.
Learn from it.
And then get back to work.
EVERY DAY, the goal is to become the sort of person who isn’t afraid of failure.
RUN THE RUNNABLE 😉