Just One Joey: What Is The Upside To Failure?

Losing sucks.

Winning feels good.

Worse than losing is being a loser, or feeling like it.

I felt like the biggest piece of s*** loser for a long time, and still do on some occasions.

It’s no fun.

The good thing is there is a huge upside to f’ing up.

Clarity.

With every mistake, every failure, is the clarity of what went wrong. To be specific, where YOU went wrong. We don’t blame failure on anyone but ourselves ‘round these parts. If you want to stay, you are going to have to suck it up and dig deep. We are about fixing ourselves here. No excuses.

Failure does not mean an instant clarification on where you went wrong, but it is the beginning of an opportunity for you to find out what went wrong. I hope you use it wisely.

Why did you make that decision?

Start at “ground zero,” then work your way backwards. As soon as you start blaming other people, you need to stop and re-evaluate. Even if you think other people had a hand in your failure, you need to find how you allowed them to have a hand in your failure. i.e. it’s still your failure bucko.

There is a root to everything. You now have the opportunity to find it.

There is a weakness in you, in all of us. We are susceptible to do some pretty stupid stuff. Tony Robbins says that if you don’t plan for what can take you down, you will inevitably be taken down. You need to plan for the worst. In doing that, you will have already played out the “failure” scenario and you will be able to navigate through it without taking a huge dump on yourself.

Isn’t it easier not to make the mistake in the first place? Uh, yeah. But we don’t have that option now, do we?

You didn’t exactly listen to Tony Robbins and navigate your failure did ya?

So we move forward.

Past mistakes will tell you what you need to work on. The fact that you even have past mistakes means there are things you need some work. Would it have been better to have a stronger sense of character, more self-discipline, self-awareness? Uh, yeah. But it is better to get that now then continue to make mistakes over and over again.

With all this new-fangled clarity you can look at your mess honestly. If it’s a big enough failure, everyone you know will be able to look at it with you. Not great, but now you have no place to hide. There are no more excuses, or fibs, or major lies depending on what your failure was. You have is your bare ass out in the wide open, and it’s surprisingly refreshing. Not comfortable, but not as bad as you thought, little chilly, not bad. But now you can deal with it honestly, break free from your shackles of deceit, and live your life out in the open (which feels amazing).

Damn that’s a relief.

Not a great relief, but you are starting to see the upside.

You can rebuild from the ground up, planning for your weaknesses, with a better understanding of who you are, where you want to be, and more importantly, where you don’t want to be, and more importantly than that, where you could possibly be if you are not careful, smarter, and honest.

You think two out of the three pigs built their house with straw and twigs the next time? Hell no, and neither will you. You can be a house of bricks if you work on it. This will take time, but you can use the desire to never want to fail again to succeed this time.

You will be a better version of you than you have ever been, because you are able to cut out the failure and rebuild stronger than ever.

“Failure Isn’t Final.”

Remember that.

Keep pushing.

Joey

My Story Of Failure And How I Came Back Better Than Ever

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