It’s a normal part of trying new things, succeeding or failing in them. But what should you do if you don’t succeed at first?
Should you give up or should you work on it? When you try something new and don’t get the results at first, it’s important to know how to respond, learn from them and keep moving forward.
Here’s a guide to help you plan through your failure and what actions you have to take so you don’t fail the next time.
Let’s make a different plan.
The Right Mindset you need to have now
1. Correct the definition of failure
It’s important to change how we think about failure. Failure is not the opposite of success. Instead, failure and success are steps on the same path and failure comes before success.
You need to fail to succeed.
From your past experiences, you know how many times did you fail before you succeeded? You have failed many times and every failure brought you closer to success not far from success.
So, do I need to have this mindset that I will not succeed at first in anything I try – No it’s not true.
We all work for success.
While some things might take more than one try to get right, not everything requires repeated failure before you can succeed.
In the short term we can ignore failure but in the long term we all seek and do the work for success. So it’s not always the case that you have to fail many times in everything you try.
2. You are More than a Beginner Now
Making mistakes is a normal part of learning. Every time you make a mistake, you’re actually gaining experience at the cost of making mistake.
So don’t close the door for mistakes, they’re helping you grow. This experience will help you further in getting the results.
Most successful self-made people make lots of mistakes. They notice them faster and quit going down the dead-end path so they can try something different. They don’t keep trying to hammer that square peg into the round hole. –Forbes
What have you grown now is just because of how many times you failed, not how many times you succeeded.
If you don’t believe me, count how many times you have succeeded or achieved the result you want and how many times you have failed.
The failure count will be more than the success count. This is true even in my case and for others too.
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. -Albert Einstien
Think about how many times you’ve tried something and didn’t get it right the first time. That’s not failure; that’s progress in other words.
3. Take Failure as ‘Not to Regret’
I see failure as ‘Not to regret’ thing. It is good as I don’t have to regret on the past. I have atleast tried it.
Okay, I haven’t not succeeded in it. But I have no regret that I haven’t tried.
It’s most daunting when you beat yourself up over what you could have done or started in the past but you haven’t done it and now you regret on it as the time has gone.
But when you do something and even if you don’t succeed, there is no regret left.
The cost of failure is much lower than the cost of regret. – Robin Sharma
Your mind knows you have worked for it although the results you want that doesn’t appear. But you did it.
Taken from Forbes
This is what you should do if you don't succeed at first
1. Make a list of what you’ve tried – You have tried something and it didn’t work. So you are the most authentic resource for yourself who has the information about this as you know clearly what you have tried.
Make a list of it. Include all the tasks you’ve done, plan you’ve followed, the resources you’ve used and how much days have you worked on it. This is your own list made from your experience.
Most importantly you have to analyse your results what went wrong in the first approach that stopped the results to come. What resource you missed, what advice you missed, write on that list.
Photo by Liza Summer from Pexels
This is the best time to make a list as later you’ll surely forget what and how you’ve tried.
This list will save your time from now on. When you are trying it next time, looking for resources, new strategies to follow, new plan to make now your mind knows exactly what you’ve tried and it didn’t work.
Also when you want to make the decision to quit, you’ll have your own list made by yourself consists of all the things you’ve tried from the start. You can say confidently that this is what I’ve tried and why it won’t work.
This is how you build your experience.
2. You Get to Know your weaknesses – This is a good way to know your weaknesses. You try something different and found you are not good at it. Then you start working on it and it’s no more a weakness for you.
You can never know your weaknesses by sitting on a chair and thinking ‘What’s my weakness’.
Your mind can’t answer this question. You can only have the right answer of it, if you try something and it don’t work or simply you don’t get the results what you aim for.
You can analyse ‘Ok this is where I am lacking, let’s learn this.’
3. Plan what different you are going to do next – You know your previous strategy or plan that didn’t work. Now you have to put something different in your strategy to get to your results.
If you repeat the same plan, you’ll likely to get the same results as earlier. Change your approach based on what you’ve learned from your previous attempts.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results . -Albert Einstien
The best part about not succeeding at first is, it showed you that if you work on your goal with the plan A, you will get these results which you don’t want. Now if you again follow the plan A, you will again get the same results that you don’t like.
And notice now by making a list of what didn’t work, you can drop those resources, plans or strategies that you’ve already tried to make a different plan.
This is why I said previously you are not a beginner now.
This is the advantage you have gotten by paying the cost of failing. Use this advantage.
4. Define your Goal outcome – We don’t define the goal outcome at the first.
As you are trying it next time, You can state yourself what do I want to happen by doing this. How the outcome looks like?
This is how you get clarity in your plan and outcome both.
Make sure your goals are achievable. Setting realistic targets helps keep you motivated and on track.
Read this post on how setting manageable goals keeps you motivated from author James Clear.
It’s really important to set clear expectations in what you try so that next time if you fail or succeed you know that this was my goal and this happened. And then you can measure the difference in them.
By not making outcome clear to yourself, you will do the work, get some results but then you’ll say ‘This is not what I want’ because you haven’t defined it first that you want the outcome look like. The plan you followed and the results you get now were on a different path.
So write what you want to happen from this so that you don’t confuse yourself in the middle and not even at the end.
5. Do the Work – You now have a new plan, new mindset and you know how your outcome looks like.
It’s time to take the action and do the work.
You don’t need to predict what will happen, you have analysed your past and learned the mistakes to not repeat them again.
Start applying your new strategy. Start working on it.
Photo from Layerbag
6. Celebrate Your Small Wins – We often make the aim for that one outcome that we want. We think that nothing is important except that outcome.
But this is a wrong mindset as it keeps your happiness in the future. You don’t see the happiness in the present and you look for it in future.
As you don’t get the happiness in present, you don’t like what you do now, you like that outcome in the future.
You must see your successes as a combination of planning, preparation, and execution.
Reward yourself for those small wins as you did them today, you have to reward every step on the path of your goal.
There is no motivation you need if you are content with what you do everyday.
7. Learn from the mistakes of others – In today’s world, everything you gonna do is done by most of the people whether in business, technology or Finance (If you are not having completely out of the box idea).
So if they have done it, you can do it too.
They are sharing their mistakes that you should not do, they are sharing the path that they followed. This saves lot of your time.
You know now what to do and what to don’t. What path to follow, how much time it would take.
Now after all this you fail then it’s fine maybe you have done something different or something worked for that person might not work for you too.
Learn it again and try it again.
What if I fail again?
Repeat the above process again.
Analyse the mistakes, learn from the mistakes, plan different, take action on it.
The point is you can’t do something once and declare that it’s not working for you. This is the only way to do it. There is no strategy, no secret that you are missing that can give you results immediately so that you don’t have to try next time.
Take sports as an example. If you choose any sport to learn which you don’t know, you will spend weeks failing before the first success shows up.
Learning a completely new skill has the first chapter that says you will fail.
Like starting a youtube channel. You can only start a youtube channel if you have the patience and agree to failures more than success. Nothing happens by making even 50 videos. You can get views in not passing above 1000.
I have seen lot of youtube channels for my learning and sometimes I get to see channels that are working pretty hard to build their audience, they are creating informative and original videos, they have over 500 videos but they are not seeing the results they want, the subscribers count is not going up, the views count is not going up.
They are trying and trying and trying knowing that this is the part of the process.
If you want to take one thing from this post, then that is ‘You need start accepting the failures‘. You should not get surprised that you expected success but the failure showed up.
This is what we call ‘Persistence’. Persistence is not keep doing the work when you are succeeding and seeing the results, it’s about doing the same work even if you don’t see the results.
You are not afraid of failure, you are afraid of trying it again.
In this video, Arnold Schwaznegger one of the highest paid hollywood superstar, winner of 13 bodybuilding champioship answered clearly the doubt what if i fail? You have to fail and get up, fail and get up… This is what winners do.
Story of Rober 1 of Scotland
Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland, faced many defeats in his fight for Scottish independence. Hiding in a cave after losing several battles, he watched a spider trying to spin a web. The spider failed repeatedly but kept trying until it succeeded. Inspired by the spider’s determination, Robert the Bruce decided to keep fighting. He learned from his past mistakes and eventually led Scotland to victory.
A year ago, I wanted to learn to juggle a football, but I hadn’t touched the football before only seen it .
I searched how to do it, watched a video and thought, ‘Oh, it’s easy, you just have to pass the ball to the other leg’. I took the ball from my friend, went home, and started.
I was trying, trying and trying.
Not even a single time, I was able to pass the ball to other leg. But after keep trying it in a week , my mind learned the pattern and I was able to juggle 5-6 times in a single go.
When you should quit
Look at how many attempts you have made – You should know this nothing happens in your first attempt. Don’t leave and back up at the first or second attempt only.
The more attempts you have made, the better you can figure out whether you have to continue it or not.
That’s what I said in the first point that ‘Make a list’. Your list will show you what worked for you.
Remove the ‘keep trying’ mindset – See the progress of the results after you have tried multiple times. If you don’t see much difference, even with different plans or strategies, think about quitting.
Every try costs you time, attention, or money.
Because we all don’t have infinite time or money. If you are running out of resources, spending your time and attention, you really want to get results out of it.
Summing up
You won’t get to see the results at the first time. You need to spend time learning that and building the experience.
Correct how you define the failure. Failure is just another word of learning. Treat failure with ‘No Regret’ mindset.
Remember you are more than a beginner now.
Follow the plan to start it over – make a list, analyse your mistakes and the results you got, look how others are doing, make a plan and keep doing it.
Most skills require multiple failures before your first success shows up.
Know when to quit if it’s really not working, you don’t have to try till the end. People leave the things in the middle if they don’t feel continuing.
It’s better to continuing something where you are able to see your growth.
