Here’s What My Younger Self Can Teach You About Failure

You never truly fail until you stop trying (Einstein)

Growing up I had hundreds of brilliant ideas, or at least I though those ideas were brilliant. From quick money making schemes to longterm success plans, my young brain was always churning out new ideas. Whether they succeeded or failed I was always willing to see them through to the end, that end often being miserable failure but the process was fun. As I grew up I started losing the enthusiasm to try new things. The once inconsequential failures that served as part of the process to succeed now had consequences.

With puberty came a new type of self awareness that was previously absent in my day to day life. Interactions with others became less innocent and now held deeper meanings. With age came feelings of anxiety, envy, inferiority and competitiveness. Success meant gaining the recognition of others and failure now meant losing that recognition. As those feelings continued to grow within me as I aged I began to fear that failure, the expectations of others and run from the possibility of failure.

Don’t fear your failure, you’re giving it more power than is has!

Moving to a new city at the age of 9, the form of success I was chasing was social success. At that age being acknowledged by your peers and reaching the so called ‘popularity’ was the greatest form of success you could achieve. In an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by children that looked different from myself achieving social success became all the more important.

In Nigeria I had always been good at the football (soccer for you U.S. folk), moving to Vienna Austria I hoped to distinguish myself once more through the sport. My hopes of quick social success were quickly dashed as I couldn’t keep up with the other kids. Not only was I not used to the weather conditions and the high altitude of the country, but I had started playing the game with a different attitude. I had to win. Where my focus had once been on enjoying the game with my peers, I now believed that only through winning and distinguishing myself in games would I achieve success. This put immense pressure on myself and the game that was once a fun pass time lost its fun resulting in me quitting the sport forever a couple years later.

The pressure I put on myself was far too great, and this pressure I put on myself as a child directly mirrors the pressure people often put on themselves to succeed in todays world. Once you focus on the consequences of failure you tend to put pressure on yourself to succeed. But what I realise now as a young adult is that there were never really any consequences to failure, at least not in the way I thought. I did end up making friends at my new school, few of which came from the football team I was part of, and none of which became my friend as a result of by football skills.

The first lesson my younger self taught me was not give too much value to failure, because failure is part of the process. Fearing failure and letting it consume you will result in unnecessary mental strain. Because the truth is, failure was one of the many roadblocks on my road to success, and without those failures we wouldn’t be who we are today.

Quitting because it’s hard is the dumbest thing you can do!

Riding a bicycle is a milestone most people reach with ease. Much like other kids I had a bicycle with training wheels growing up. The other kids had started to ride without their training wheels so I too wanted to catch up, but doing so immediately made me nervous so I started by taking off one of the training wheels. After a couple weeks of riding a bike that way I finally gained the courage and removed the other training wheel. The average kid learns to ride a bike without training wheels in three to four weeks. It took me roughly 2 months. However my younger self wouldn’t be deterred, at the young age of 7 years old I refused to give up and rode my bike everyday until I eventually got the hang of it.

Similarly to my younger self I found myself once again trying to learn a new skill at the age of 15. This time I was trying to learn a trick on my longboard. I studied countless hours, watched hundreds of videos and was at it everyday. However unlike my younger self after a mere 2 weeks of trying I became impatient, I blamed my longboard for being ill-suited to the trick and never attempted it again.

When I was younger I was never frustrated at myself for learning to fail something in that moment. Failure just meant that I wasn’t there yet and with repeated trial and error I would eventually reach my goal, time was irrelevant. However with age came impatience, with every failure came frustration and with frustration came self deprecation. The trick was too hard, the board was too heavy, I was untalented, these were all things I told myself until I eventually gave up.

However what my younger self knew that I did not at the time was that all those things didn’t matter. Repeated practice would result in my success no matter how long it took and by quitting just because the task was difficult would make the effort I had put until that point meaningless. Success requires work, and work can often times be hard, but if you quit just because something is hard, you won’t achieve anything in the end.

Giving up before you start is the true meaning of failure!

I’ve always loved achieving things others could not, as competitive as I was and still am, doing things that others deemed impossible was always fun. This trait of mine came out in one particular instance during programming class in the 7th grade. The teacher had assigned us the task which was to present our design project in a creative way. Every student had to create a website and make it interesting for those going through the project website. One of the ways he introduced was including a virtual 3D assistant and having it introduce your project however he said he had not yet figured out how to import the virtual assistant into our websites, but that those up to the challenge were encouraged to try although he didn’t have high hopes for it.

This immediately ignited my competitive spirit. I rushed home to complete it, reading instructions on instructions, videos on videos until finally I completed it what my teacher had deemed difficult. Knowing that the teacher wasn’t expecting me to succeed only made me want to work harder, the teachers expectations of us students, or rather lack there of was irrelevant, I was going to achieve it no matter what. As i got older however it became harder to ignore the expectations of others and those expectations began to scare me.

A particular instance of this can be seen when I attempted to make money dropshipping for the first time. I had read about dropshipping and other people’s impressive successes in that industry and became convinced that I could do the same. My wonderful mother hearing me talk with such excitement decided to fund me by loaning me 300 bucks. At first it started smoothly, my mother didn’t really expect anything but rather hoped I would do my best no matter the outcome. I did more research and gained more traction, but as I started laying down the groundwork I started reading stories about people failing to succeed in the industry. I began to put pressure on myself to succeed after all my mother had invested in me and i’ve always hated disappointing my mother.

I never even got to the actual dropshipping before finding an excuse to quit. I had already allocated all my money in different areas laying down the groundwork to begin. However i hit a roadblock and the moment I did, I slowly started working at the project less until I wasn’t working at it anymore. In truth with enough work I could have probably solved my issues and gotten started, however I began to fear failure, failure would mean failing to meet my mothers expectations and the easiest way to avoid failure was not starting at all. Finding an excuse for why I could not continue pushed the reason for failure onto something else which meant that I never really failed.

This was just an excuse however. My mother never reproached it to me, in fact he didn’t mind, it was just 300 bucks, all she said was “you failing to succeed at dropshipping doesn’t really matter, but it’s the fact that you never really even tried that’s a little disappointing”. See because as my mother explained it to me, failure doesn’t mean anything, failure is the delay of eventual success, but you can only truly fail, when you don’t even attempt anything at all. By fearing the expectations on myself and fearing disappointing my mother, I didn’t even start, which resulted in my one true failure.

So what can you learn from this?

When you’re younger things are easier. You can attempt this as many times as it takes without giving up because your failures is simply not as important as you eventual success. You don’t fear your failures because each time you fail you learn enough to improve just a little bit. Rather than quitting after trying, you’ll keep going because if you give up after putting in work then you truly achieve nothing. Most importantly, as children you never fear trying new things because when you start something there is nothing to lose.

As i’ve grown up i’ve had my fair share of successes, but everyone of those successes hide a mountain of failures, and any successful person will tell you the same thing. So let’s learn from our younger self. Only by emulating the innocent and fearlessness of youth can we achieve great things, because success and failure are like two sides of the same coin, you can’t have one without the other. So don’t fear failure, you never fail unless you stop trying (Einstein).