“If I fail more than you do, I win. Built into this notion is the ability to keep playing. If you get to keep playing, sooner or later you’re gonna make it succeed. The people who lose are the ones who don’t fail at all, or the ones who fail so big they don’t get to play again.”
Seth Godin
Beyond the Quote (121/365)
If you try and you fail—and you quit—you lose. If you try and you fail—and you adjust and try again—you win. The ultimate failure in life isn’t the failures we inevitably stumble upon from our trials, it’s the failure to not try (or to stop trying) at all. Without trial in life, you defer to passivity. You choose to watch rather than play. And while it’s fun to watch sometimes, playing is where all of the magic happens. Playing is the active process of interacting with your surroundings in a way that allows you to learn. When you try, your whole being makes an incalculable number of adjustments and improvements so that you can better play moving forward. You just can’t do that from the sideline.
“But from the sideline, no one can laugh at the failures that will inevitably occur,” you might say. And while that’s true, what you’re forgetting is that you’re deferring from what we’ll call being “hated on” to becoming irrelevant. When you don’t play the game, you become more and more irrelevant to the ones who are actually playing—how could you not? And while you might think that watching is more “safe” than playing because you get to avoid being laughed at, made fun of, “hated on,” or whatever—what you’re choosing instead is withdrawal and self-imposed isolation. This is no way to live. We’re social creatures and we need connection and interaction. So, let’s break down “hate” and learn how to “win” against that first.
How to “Win” Against Hate
If somebody “hates” on something that you do or produce and it makes you not want to do it anymore—you lose. If somebody “hates” on your work and that fires you up because it makes you want to prove them wrong (for example)—you win. Same hate. Slight shift in perspective. Radical shift in what will result. This isn’t to say that getting “hated on” won’t still hurt or feel bad. It will. As do most growing opportunities—you’re outside of your comfort zone, remember? It’s going to be uncomfortable out there.
Getting “hated on” is sometimes inevitable—learn to use it as fuel rather than fact. When you listen to the hate and internalize it, it becomes a part of your chemistry. And harboring “hate” inside is only going to manifest more hate and ill-will. What you could do instead is take somebody else’s hate and deconstruct it—remove the toxic emotions and unnecessary negativity—and take the constructive parts that are lift (if any) and use them to improve your process. Then, you can continue to pour love into your project from a more well-rounded perspective and have an even better result. Ultimately, projects of love always outperform projects of hate.
Furthermore, who’s to say that being “hated on” is the inevitable outcome anyway? What if you surrounded yourself with people who wanted to play the game fairly, honestly, and in good spirit? Wouldn’t that be great if you could play the game of life with people who support you, laugh with you, can give you constructive feedback, and can poke fun at themselves? These are the environments you should relentlessly seek to find and these are the types of games and people that you should fight to be engaged with. What’s more likely, is that in your process of playing to “win” and improve, you’ll face more setbacks, hate, and failures than you might expect—and you’ll get frustrated. If you learned how to stop someone else from taking you out of the game—don’t lose to yourself after all of that work! Let’s, next, break down and learn how to “win” against frustration.
How to “Win” Against Frustration
If you give up because what you’re trying to do isn’t turning out the way you want it to—you lose. If you let your annoyance towards a problem get to you because of your inability to solve it (yet)—you lose. If you get so upset that you can’t change a situation that you stop trying to improve it at all—you lose. The only way to win against frustration is to, again, not let it stop you from trying.
When you expect something to go one way and it doesn’t—over and over again—it can be hard to not get frustrated and want to quit. The first way to better prevent this, so that you can “win,” is to better manage expectations. The fact that you’re expecting something to end a certain way means you’re projecting some of your mental resources into the future and creating a vision for how things should end up. Stop doing that. Internalize the idea that things will end up how they will end up. Detach from the future. Focus all of your mental resources on the here and now. This will give you more focused energy and it will eliminate that basis of comparison that is the root cause of your frustration. You’ll be left with just you and the problem and the resources available to you in this moment.
Another tip that will help you best deal with frustration is a better understanding of perseverance. Perseverance is not just the ability to try, try again. Perseverance is about having the same goal, over and over again. This means that how you try can (and should) change. If one way doesn’t work, try another way. If that way doesn’t work out as good as the first way, then go back to the first way. If it still doesn’t solve the problem, try a different approach yet again. The goal, when clearly decided upon and dedicated to, shouldn’t change. Your approach is what changes. So, before you drive yourself insane with frustration (for, what is insanity but doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results), keep the problem-solving process interesting and change it up when you see fit.
By learning how to courageously step into the game, how to keep getting back into the game after facing failure, how to use “hate” as fuel rather than fact, and how to mitigate frustration—what could stop you? The bottom line is that with all of these forces, it’s YOU. YOU are the only one who could stop you. YOU are the one who convinces yourself to watch from the sidelines. YOU are the one who tells yourself that failure is too much. YOU are the one who takes hate personally. YOU are the one who lets frustration overwhelm you. YOU are the one who is in control—do you see it? Don’t lose to yourself. Learn how to “win” against yourself first and all of the other trials for success will end as “wins” too. How could they not?
Read Next: 10 Empowering Seth Godin Quotes from The Icarus Deception To Help You Take Your Leap
Don't Let the Motivation Stop There...!
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