“Failure is the most powerful motivator, teacher, and philosopher any one of us will ever come into contact with”
I ultimately want to succeed. I ultimately want you to succeed. I want everyone reading this and around the world who has not gotten the opportunity to read this yet to succeed.
But barely any of these wishes will come to fruition. And it is not because some people are born with better genetics, or flashier athleticism, or insane beauty, it is because they were willing to put the work in and others were not.
Just this morning, I failed yet again. I failed to stay awake after my alarm went off. That failure taught me more than all the times in the past two weeks that I have successfully gotten up and stayed up. That is because failure is the most powerful motivator, teacher, and philosopher any one of us will ever come into contact with.
As you can probably tell by now, after reading this short excerpt or some of my other articles, I am obsessed with progress. I want to understand it, know what it is at its core, so that I can apply it to my own life.
This doesn’t happen easily, as I’m sure you’ve ascertained by now. If you haven’t, you’re in for one hell of a reality check. Work is all that is required to succeed. Not your 9-5, but the work that you put in on the side every single day that attributes to your potential successes in the days, weeks, months, years, and even decades to come. The greatest thing I can teach you is the main subject of this article. Self-sabotage is real and it is why only 1% of people succeed. Apply these few practices well and consistently, and you will be able to break through the confines of self sabotage and achieve your wildest dreams.
What is Self-Sabotage and Why do we inflict it upon ourselves?
First, we must understand what self-sabotage is. This is the practice that around 98-99% of the population instills upon themselves to make sure they will not succeed, change, grow, prosper, or achieve more. Believe me, nobody does this on purpose. It is actually hardwired into our brains at birth, and we have to learn these few simple steps that it takes to overcome it.
Why do we employ these measures when we could easily give them up and start succeeding today? If you read my last article about working on the weekends, then you know a bit about how the brain works and why it works the way it does. I am going to explain it a bit further in this article to drive home why we are born with the function to shut our own growth down completely.
When we are born, our brain has been developing for 9 months inside our mother’s womb. We have learned to rely on her to give us life, and now we have 2 people, our parents to hopefully give us food and shelter for our adolescent years so that we can learn the world slowly and at a gentle pace. Some people are not fortunate enough to have 2 parents, or even 1, and have to learn to live on their own means, at an age that is far too young to be living completely on their own. These people, however empathetic you may feel for them, or if you had the bad luck of becoming one of them, are actually much further ahead mentally in the game of life then any one of us will ever hope to be as this point.
Examples of Successful People who came from nothing
Let’s just take a look at some of the most successful people in the world, and you will see my point:
- LeBron James: came from extreme poverty, top 3 basketball player of all time
- Diego Maradona: came from extreme poverty, legendary soccer player
- Caron Butler: drug dealer to multi-millionaire NBA star
- Oprah Winfrey: came from a terrible childhood and extreme poverty to billionaire
- Howard Schultz: came from the projects, then created Starbucks
- Larry Ellison: came from south side of Chicago, created Oracle, net worth of $60+ Billion
- Sheldon Adelson: came from Boston, born to extremely poor immigrants, owner of Las Vegas Sands, net worth of $35+ Billion
- J.K. Rowling: had weeks where she wouldn’t eat so that her daughter could, created the Harry Potter book series, now is a Billionaire.
These examples are not meant to motivate you. They are meant to show you that anyone can overcome the simple switch in your brain that has to be turned, regardless of your background, regardless of your upbringing, rich or poor, born with beauty or not, two parents, one, or even zero. It simply doesn’t matter. If you come from a worse off background, the switch is easier to turn, and if you come from a wealthier background where money is plentiful already, then the switch becomes harder to turn.
What is the switch and how do I turn it on?
As I mentioned before, your brain is born with a simple survival mechanism that keeps it safe and makes sure that you live long enough so that you can procreate and keep the race going. It is a very simple thing, but this is the justification behind the reason your brain will sabotage you when you strive for change. What is this reason?
Your brain seeks comfort, because comfort is the one feeling that assures your brain that everything will be okay and we will live a long time. However unhappy, unfulfilled, and terrible that life is, your brain doesn’t care. It doesn’t give a rat’s a** about you and your dreams.
As long as you live long enough to have kids, your brain could care less about how you get there.
This is the switch that needs to be switched on. This is the very thing that has been holding you back. You need to switch from the mindset that comfort is where happiness lies. True, when you experience comfort, there is momentary happiness, but that fades away quickly as your brain searches for a more extreme level of comfort. This leads down a dangerous path. Some examples include overeating, binge watching TV, consuming X-rated activities through the internet, drugs, alcohol, and anything else you can think of that gives you momentary comfort and could be labeled as addictive.
This is also why people from a lesser background in terms of money or housing grow and become more than 99% of people on Earth. It is because they have already made the switch, or because they were forced to live in an uncomfortable setting for so long that they got tired of it and became successful, sometimes without even trying to.
What holds 99% of us back?
We, either consciously or not, realize that we have something stable to fall back on if our dreams fail, and so we never put 100%, our entire being and soul, into what we love, what we cherish. Because if we truly cherished it, then nothing else would matter.
We would strive to be better than we were yesterday. We would work until we couldn’t work anymore because we wouldn’t care about a moment’s worth of comfort because we would know that if we kept working, then we could change our life and become something most people only dream of, happy.
Some people have already made the switch. I am currently trying to push mine from off to on, but for me, the switch is slightly harder to turn on because I know that if I completely fail, I have a support system, I will not run out of money in the process.
The Realization
Something amazing occurred to me this morning. It was that without discomfort, nothing ever grows. I want you to understand that when you fail, when you experience that discomfort, realize that this is the feeling you want to feel.
At the very least, better feeling discomfort that you know you have an opportunity to grow from than comfort, which you have felt hundreds to thousands of times and you already know that nothing magical comes from.
As always, follow us on all social media platforms if you want more articles like this to read and grow from. We are a few weeks away from starting up our YouTube channel, so that you can watch these posts in video format if that is your preferred method of learning.
Let’s grow together. That is the goal for this company. To teach you the skills I have learned the hard way. To teach you and spill my ideas out about what I believe to be the best methods for growth. The best methods to obtain true happiness. True passion. True confidence. I want all of that for you. I am trying everyday to deliver on that promise.
Come win with me.
