Why Do We Fail?

by Bharat Jhala-
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As soon as you open your mind to doing things differently, the doors of opportunity practically fly off their hinges. – Jay Abraham

Ever wondered why do we fail?

In the process of goal achievement, almost we all hit the hard rock of a failure. We set our goals and we are also very enthusiastic and positive to achieve them in the beginning. We start working for goals and something goes wrong and we fall upside down. Again back to square one. Yes, we hit that hard rock of failure again.

I know how it feels. Let’s not talk about that. I firmly believe that at any given moment, we reserve the power to say that this is not how this story is going to end.

Learning from failure and improving our efforts is the key to go a long-long way.

Let’s find out why we fail?

I was reading one amazing book Passion Test by Janet Atwood and Chris Atwood, there it was a very thought provoking interview of Jay Abraham – a well-known marketing Guru. Jay talked about three main reasons for our failure. Here are those three reasons and my views on it.

Why We Fail?

While there can be a number of contributing factors to a failure, there are three main reasons that can be found in most of the failures. If we take care of those three things, we can save ourselves from experiencing the pain of failure to a large extent. These three factors are:

Lack of Clarity
Lofty Goals and Unrealistic timeline
We give up too early

Let’s examine them closely.

1. Lack of Clarity

“Peace of mind comes through the clarity of thoughts. – Sri Sri”

Those who know me personally know that this is my favourite quote.

Whenever I am not at rest or feel disturbed about anything, I always ask myself: “Do I have clarity on this matter for which I am feeling disturbed?” – and the most of the time the answer is “NO”. And I tell myself, “that’s why you are not at the peace.” Having clarity in life is a very important thing.

The current version of our life is the result of choices that we made in our past. And every choice has its own consequences. Hence, today’s choices play a very important role in shaping our tomorrow. If we don’t know what exactly we want, chances are we might end up making wrong choices or taking an absolute wrong route for our journey that we might have to regret later.

In reality, we do not care to invest sufficient time to enhance our clarity on any new goals or decisions we make. We are always in rush for taking actions right away. Remember, the faster we climb the ladder which is not leaned against the right wall, the earlier we’ll reach at the top of the wrong height!

A lack of clarity or not having a clear vision for our path results in waste of our time, energy and efforts. They all often come with a heavy price tag!

When we don’t have a clear vision about what we want in our life, we easily get driven away with the external influences. These external influences come from parents, teachers, peers, media, movie, trends, books etc. these all influence our thoughts, feelings and actions to the extent that we end up committing a mistake or making wrong choices.

Many of us regret their choices in life. After investing a lot of time, money and energy, suddenly they realize this is not what they wanted to study or become in their life, or this is not a life partner they always dreamed about or this is not what they want to do in their whole life.

Due to a lack of clarity we also do not put our 100% efforts for our goals and we waste time doing all meaningless activities or hanging out with all wrong people who are good for nothing. This costs us a few good precious years of time in our life. But often we realize our mistakes too late and after a great damage already have done to our emotional and financial life and career.

Needless to say, that it results in a big chaos in life. Starting things all over again and again wastes lot of time from our life.

Lack of clarity thus ruins our peace of mind.

Always take time to think, reflect, re-calculate and try to find proper answers for all your concerns and questions before you execute any idea or plan. By this, I am not suggesting you should become a victim of a disease called analysis paralysis. I am simply suggesting, to give it a little more thought to be clear about what you want, how you want it, and what are the possible obstacles that you might face on the way of achievement and how would you overcome them.

2. Lofty Objectives and Unrealistic Timeline

The other day I got super motivated watching 8-minutes Abs workout video on YouTube and I set a goal to achieve six pack abs in 2 months! Yes, it’s amazing to see that how we all like to believe that how fast our wishes can and should get fulfilled!

The result of my goal of six pack abs was terrible. I didn’t only fail but also felt so much confused and frustrated. However, the genius me, I set the same goal for so many times in last two years!! Yes, sometime we want something so desperately that we stop being rationale about wanting them.

Later on, I figured out how all exercise game works, and how diet and discipline play an important role in health related goals. That YouTube video I was watching was just not right for me.

Things happen in stages, and we must leave a room for the gestation period. Making tall goals with unrealistic time frame only live short life and die on paper itself. Nothing concrete can really be achieved with this meaningless exercise. It only increases our frustrations and confusions.

Although, the biggest lessons I learned from this is not to make any goal or decision when I am super excited or experiencing a little too much positive or negative surge of emotions about anything.

When we are in deep emotional state, whatever we will decide, most of the time it will be a wrong decision. Why? Because when we are excited or feeling low or high, we don’t use our logical brain while making choices. We decide based on our feelings and emotions. It’s okey to feel strong for something, but to make any decision about it requires calm, composed and focused mind.

A solid decision requires research, reflections, contemplation, clarity and good reasonability; and that cannot be achieved without having balanced mind while making decision.

Have you experienced any failure lately? If yes, check on what you were set out to achieve. Were your goals too impressive with unrealistic timeline attached to them? – Think, think, my friend.

3. We Give Up.

Yes we give up. Very easily and too early in the most of our endeavours. This is very unfortunate, in fact.

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting at all. – Buddha

Any new project that we undertake where our learning curve is involved, we bound to make mistakes and experience series of failures in the beginning. However, here failures are like the guiding posts, which point us into the right directions. If we have an eye to see through our failures, they clearly show us the true path. Our failures clearly depict what can work and what cannot, where to change and where to challenge or where to surrender.

In short, failures are great teachers. We only fail when we fail to learn from our failures.

Rather giving up in frustration, we must tell ourselves: “Now I got it right, now I understood more clearly, let me recalibrate myself and move on.”

Instead, we take the most convenient route of being loser and we give up with all heavy negative emotions in our heart about failure. This simply does not help. This is a wrong action leading to a wrong result.

Persistence is the key here, don’t be afraid of a failure, don’t give up, keep moving on and you will see all emotions attached with short term failure are only temporary.

So What’s The Right Attitude to Practice?

Success is all about a learning attitude. We have to be careful while choosing our thoughts and forming our beliefs.

Allow only those thoughts, ideas or criticism that empowers you, drop everything else. Detach your determination from the fear of failure, and keep moving forward.

Call to Actions:

Be clear on what you want. Give enough thought to your wants before setting them as your goals.
Before assigning certain time line, do your research on your goal achievement, read about the people who had similar goals and had achieved before you, find out possible obstacles and prepare your strategy to deal with them.
List your source of guidance or have a mentor to look forward to in case of a need.
Breakdown your each goal into many tiny goals that are impossible to fail at. Have your list of actions ready and start taking actions on daily basis.
Remember, small progress is a profound thing. Take one small step at a time. Move forward slowly but steadily just like that winning turtle of the story.
Don’t start anything that you might quit later on out of any emotional surge, and don’t quit anything that you start. Go all the way.
Keep one failure journal to record your failures, reasons of failures, lessons learned from failures. After few years you will see that this journal has become your rich source for guidance and this wisdom will make you wise and strong.
Enjoy the process; don’t worry about the end result. Breathe, smile and keep hustling. Life is not only about achieving one thing after the other; it’s also about enjoying and living it fully.

Share your goal openly in public (use comment section below), and state how you are going to work for it. See you in next post, till then live, love and laugh – wholeheartedly and unconditionally.

Don’t forget to share this post with your friends and loved ones. Thank you.

Have fun!

Bharat Jhala

(Image Credit: Sunset Girl)