I was talking recently with an entrepreneur I mentor and we were walking through his process: throw stuff against the wall, see what sticks, learn a little, come up with new ideas, throw more stuff against the wall, etc.
“It’s all good,” he said, “I know I’m going to have to fail a bunch of times before I find something that works.”
We continued talking, but a tiny voice in my head began to whisper, quietly at first, and then it got louder. I interrupted him.
“Sorry. A minute ago you said you would have to fail a bunch before you found something that works.”
“Yup,” he replied.
“Great,” I said. “Let’s define ‘a bunch’.”
“Ok.”
“Many people think about starting a business but never do,” I said. “Of the few that do, almost all of them run smack into a brick wall and they quit. That leaves only a tiny percentage who know that they need to go through multiple walls, so they keep going.”
“You’re in that tiny percentage, and I love that you’ve managed to reach this point. You’re smart. You’re driven. But most importantly, you’re persistent.”
“Now let’s set your expectations, because ‘Fail your way to success’, and ‘Keep failing until you make it’ is on everyone’s lips nowadays, but very few people have a real sense of just how many brick walls they have to run through to get there.”
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“You’ve hit a few. You’ve felt the sting of discouragement. You’ve worked through them. There will be more walls. A lot more. More than a dozen. More than twenty. More than fifty.”
“You’re going to have to run through about 1,000 brick walls before you succeed.”
I paused. He waited in silence.
“1,000 is a fucking brutal number. It’s daunting. If you think about enduring the disappointment of learning, working, launching, and then getting nothing but crickets for all of your hard work, of failing over and over…”
“It’s crushing. And it will crush you if you dwell on it. The good news is that if you put your head down, if you continue to try, fail, and learn, you will get there. I promise. It is impossible for you to not reach your destination as long as you keep moving.”
“The only way for you to truly fail is if you stop. The magic formula for success is this: don’t stop. Find a way to keep going and you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams.”
My friend took the challenge and he’s running with it. If he takes one wall at a time, if he persists in going around, over, or through each one, and if he learns from each, there’s no way he can fail.
What about you? What are the big things you want out of life? Keep going regardless of how much failure you experience, because the only alternative is to stop and sink to the bottom with so many others, waiting for life to pass.
Don’t stop. Keep grinding. Keep working on difficult shit. Keep failing. Keep learning.
You will get there.