You can save yourself the pain of failing by…Never. Doing. Anything. – From Frustrated To Frickin Awesome

Failure sucks.

In the middle of 2017, I failed huge as a parent. My oldest kid was acting her age, and I lost it.

I yelled and scared her. I had little control over how I reacted. In the moment I felt bad, but didn’t think much more about it.

Then two days later, she did some little thing, and I was instantly livid. Not just annoyed, but blowing my top angry.

Kids have a great way of exposing our weaknesses. They owe us nothing at all and demand so much of us.

Pain Teaches

Realizing that I needed better parenting tools I read No Drama Discipline and I can say that things started going better that very week.

Months later, I have better tools to use when parenting. I’m a better parent and a better husband.

Not all pain is at home though. A number of years ago I released a product called “Hope is Not a Strategy”. I had big plans for it. It would rocket me into the realm of the great ‘internet people’, and my income would be set.

Nobody bought it at all.

It was a failure in every sense of the word, but I learned from it.

The Niche Product

From the failure of Hope is Not a Strategy, I learned that I didn’t need to do all that much work up front. When I released Finding and Marketing to Your Niche, I wrote the book and left everything else until I had a sale.

Initially, I never did the videos because no one purchased the $299 version of the product. A year later when someone did, I didn’t have the videos, but I did have The 8 Week Business BootCamp which had a section on your niche, so I offered them access to those videos instead.

They happily took it, and I still didn’t record the videos. That was just a few days ago; I’m not sure if I’ll record the videos or remove them from the sales page. Likely, I’ll leave the decision until I have more than a single person that purchases the expensive version of Finding and Marketing To Your Niche.

We too often try to avoid anything hard. Pain is viewed as something that’s bad. It’s the opposite of Cal Newport’s Any Benefit mindset.

Instead of finding any small benefit and thus justifying the use of a social network, we find any possible pain and avoid the entire action at all costs.

In Perennial Seller, Ryan Holiday says:

The fact is, most people are so terrified of what an outside voice might say that they forgo opportunities to improve what they are making. – Perennial Seller

We figure whatever idea we have is amazing and everyone else will fall into place.

It won’t. It’s likely that it will fall flat unless you put yourself through some pain and get feedback to refine the work.

Any amazing endeavour will have points where it feels like you won’t succeed. Anyone can do easy stuff. Only those that are willing to endure pain will do amazing work that everyone talks about.

What type of work are you going to do?

Have an awesome day?

Curtis

PS: To dive deeper into the pain that it takes to birth awesome products, read Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday or my review of it.

photo credit: 42405591@N02 cc