You can learn A LOT from failing!

The lessons, the insight and the education a failure can give are unlike any other. You can learn things about yourself that you never knew before! How you handle yourself under pressure. How to pivot quickly. How to survive a hard situation.

One of my biggest beliefs, if you fail, fail forward and fail fast.

One thing I realized about many people, they will say "I am thinking about doing XYZ". Instead of actually doing it. They are thinking about it, asking their friends, seeing how it feels, might be a few weeks before they actually try it.

Instead, I will say "I'm thinking about XYZ" and I will start on it right then. No delaying. If I fail, I want it to be fast. I don't want to waste all of this time and energy thinking about it before I even see if it is worth it.

Let me try TODAY and if this sucks, I don't want to spend more than a few hours on it to find out.

Some times the hesitation to the starting line is worse than the failure.

We build up this idea, this thought, and almost become intimidated by it. If I start right away, I don't give myself enough time to be intimidated by it. I'm in the act of doing. I am lazer focused to reaching a goal.

Don't psych yourself out. You are FAR MORE CAPABLE of the amazing things you THINK you can do. The only way you will find out though is if you take that first step.

Swift Action, Swift Results

If you delay an idea, getting tangible results will also be delayed. Think about that for a moment. You have this idea that you think is great. When you tell your friends about it, OF COURSE they say it is great! Isn't that funny how that works most of the time? Our friends don't want to hurt our feelings and they tell us something is great even if it isn't. When we finally try it, it is blatantly obvious that this was a bad idea but we took that reassurance from our friends that it was great! Sometimes, doing the action will show you right away that it was a bad idea. Don't delay the results! Swift Action, Swift Results! Find out if the idea actually has real merit. Everyone has a great opinion until it is time to purchase a product.

Cut the time on thinking about doing something and increase the time of actually trying it out.

Tech Conference

I wanted to throw a tech conference for my city. Never threw a conference before but I knew I really wanted to bring resources and value to people here. I approached many people with experience. Everyone said "This isn't a smart move. COVID just hit. It isn't a good time. You don't have experience." I was gutted. I really wanted to do this.

2 weeks go by and 1 person that I spoke with finally came back and said "If you really want to do this, if you really want to, I will spend some of my time to help you get this thing off of the ground."

I just looked back and said "oh, did... Did you think that I was going to stop doing this when everyone else said no? I already have all of the speakers, the software we will use to stream and organized the tracks." I realized with COVID, planning this was going to be significantly easier! I don't have to worry about the actual logistics of getting people there. When everyone said no, I wanted to see if I could actually do this but I wanted to fail fast. In doing so, I was able to make a conference that over 3000 people were able to enjoy!

I am not worried about you reaching a great level of success, I am confident you will. I'm worried that you won't try something due to a fear of failure. There are lessons in those failures. But if you have to fail, fail fast.

Keep doing amazing things.

If you like this article, chances are you'd like what I tweet as well. If you are curious, have a look at my Twitter profile. Or check out my podcast - "Commit Your Code!" where I interview and talk to some phenomenal developers and motivate you to stay on the coding journey!