Live Free Lesson 4: Failure helps you understand yourself

We should be failing on a regular basis. The best way to learn is to come up with an idea, try it, fail and use it to improve upon your next experience. When you learn something from an experience and apply that lesson to improve your life then it’s no longer a failure, it’s growth. You might be eating shit pie each day right now, but if you learn from this experience you’ll stop gobbling that shit down and make changes in your life.

Our activities must challenge us, otherwise we won’t learn more about who we are. We can’t focus on the issues that create drama; these things only distract us from failing at the things that truly help us grow. Knowing the difference between an apple pie that ties to your purpose and a shit pie that just creates needless drama takes practice. We need to say no more often to things that don’t excite us and do more of the things that create an impact.

The thing that needs to remain constant is growth. It’s ok to let go of caring about your career so much and focus on other things, but you can’t stop challenging yourself in your career or will get bored and start creating needless drama to energize yourself. This energy is usually negative, but it fills the void. We need to try new things in order to grow and learn about ourselves and the people in our lives. That’s why curiosity is so important for living a long and healthy life. If we wake up curious about something, we will have meaning in our lives. We will want to know more about that thing. We will want to see if we can find a new way. Sometimes it’s being curious about a family member’s life; other times it’s trying out a new idea at work. Whatever gets us to think of an idea, try out the idea and see how it works will motivate us to get up in the morning. It will also create failure on a regular basis, but this failure will encourage us to get back up and try again. 

Life is so much about our attitude. When we see these challenges as growth opportunities then we see how it fits into our larger purpose. Cultivating our perspective to see failure as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves, will help us reframe the situation. We have the power to unlock new ways of looking at any situation. When our project at work fails, we don’t take it personally. We see what we can improve for next time.

We don’t want to go to the grave regretting what we didn’t try to accomplish. We want to try what we can and say we gave it our best effort. That’s why understanding our fears is just as important as understanding our purpose. We can’t go after what we want if we let our fear get in the way. Our fears create that drama that distracts us from our true purpose. If you have a passion to write a book, travel to an exotic place, or start a new business then figure out why you haven’t started yet and understand why this is a struggle to you. When you dig deep you open up those mental doorways so you can go after what you really want in life. Go after things that scare you, that’s when you’ll feel more alive then you’ve ever felt. You just have to have the courage to take small steps toward these goals. You just have to put that shit pie down that is distracting you and focus on eating just a few small bites of the apple pie that makes you happier, more flexible and stronger.

You can read go and start at the beginning and read the first lesson of Living Free.