Summary
Joe and Brett explore how the concept of failure is “just an idea” — one that, when believed, dramatically reduces our capacity to try again. The habenula, a brain structure that regulates dopamine and serotonin, is designed to prevent repeated failure, but in modern life it can trap us in learned helplessness and depression. Research shows that people who succeed don’t avoid failure — they reframe it as iteration and experimentation.
Joe shares two devastating personal stories: his father, a CEO who was actually successful but believed he’d failed, spiraled into alcoholism and family destruction; and a man who’d rebuilt his life from meth addiction but collapsed back into it when he interpreted his son seeking therapy as proof of his own failure. Both illustrate how a single false story of failure can destroy lives.
The practical antidote is an iterative mindset: instead of trying once and risking “failure,” write 50 experiments you could run toward your goal. Each completed experiment is a win regardless of outcome. This reframing — from outcomes to process, from perfection to learning — is embedded throughout the Art of Accomplishment methodology: wants over shoulds, connection over perfection, self-awareness over self-improvement.
Key Concepts
- Failure is just an idea, not a reality
- An iterative mindset makes failure impossible
- The habenula enforces learned helplessness
- Reframe failure as experimentation by writing 50 experiments
- A false story of failure can destroy entire lives
- Self-improvement framing guarantees failure
- Reward failure to create innovative culture
- Cycling between performance and play accelerates learning
Key Quotes
“The idea of failure which is just an idea is one of the things that we design our entire programs to prevent.”
“As long as you don’t think there’s an end there is no such thing as failure there’s just the next iteration the next attempt the next experiment the next try.”
“His whole life defined by a failure that didn’t actually exist.”
“We never talk about self-improvement we only talk about self-awareness or self-realization or understanding yourself. The reason we do that is because you will fail at self-improvement.”
“People always overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade.”
Transcript
and in his mind he failed and in his like perception he failed and literally within a year he was back on meth his family they didn’t have any money he had abandoned them because of this idea of failure it was just an idea you see this behavior all the time in humanity and it’s an amazing thing that just gets in the way of our transformation welcome back to the art of accomplishment where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett kler here today with my co-host Joe hey Brett how’s it going on today’s episode we’re going to talk about failure yeah yeah we are we’re going to talk about failure the thing about failure that is so critical is that it is just an idea and it’s an idea that when you have it because of the way that the brain is structured when you have this idea that I failed your ability to try again goes way down you give up far more easily when you have this idea of oh I failed the idea of failure which is just an idea is one of the things that we design our entire programs to prevent and it is an idea that when you have it can totally stop you in your tracks can make it so that you don’t want to try anymore it it is a structure in the brain called the habenula that basically its job is to make sure that you don’t fail and so if you have this idea of failure Your Capacity to keep on trying and iterating goes way down and so to really understand failure can absolutely transform the way way that you do personal development work and the way that you achieve stuff in the world so to me it’s it’s critical to think about failure differently than most people do the idea of failure is it has to just be an idea I mean if you take a look at say Sam Walton right so this guy starts Walmart you know some people think he’s evil some people think he’s great but whatever it was he was on a boat coming back from World War II and he thought to himself you know autocracy is in the world the problem with them is that they have a middle class I need to support the middle class of America so he his way to do it was to increase the buying power of the middle class give stock options to clerks he did all this stuff to help the middle class oddly you know it changed over time but that was his thing that’s what he wanted to do and he failed the first time first five and dime failed second five and dime failed third five and dime Walmart right and then Sam’s Club and then everything else that him and his and his family did the restoration of the Colorado River and and all the restoration of the soran and the stuff they’re doing with like rhinos in in Africa right now all of that propelled because he apparently failed but he didn’t fail you know and I don’t think anyone’s going to look at Sam Walton and go oh that dude was a failure so the idea of failure is time limited like you have to have you have to think that there is a time like line on life and that there’s some end to it as long as you don’t think there’s an end there is no such thing as failure there’s just the next iteration the next attempt the next experiment the next try but if your mind says no I failed then the way that the mind is structured with this part of the brain called the habenula boom you’re going to say oh wow I failed and then your chances of trying again go way down how many times you’re going to try again goes way down and so it’s really important to to reframe just the concept of failure that’s really interesting this this idea of an end because I think there in our work we talk a lot about the false end and you know in skydiving or base jumping we would often say that any jump you walk away from is a success and then the cor are there is a jump that you die on is a failure and it just seems like duh what what do you have to say about when when a failure is defined as well my company ended therefore it’s a failure it’s just a failure and now I move on the problem is so the the part of the brain called that Bena it’s it’s job is to and of course this is neuroscience so everything’s going to change in 5 10 years but generally the thing about the habenula it is a regulator for the dopamine and the serotonin production and so basically what it’s designed to do is help you succeed if you’re say like a rat running a maze You’ go one way and it doesn’t work this part of the brain is designed to tell you don’t go that way again if you are a bear and you’re fighting for mating rights or a lion fighting for mating rights and you fail that part of the brain says don’t try again because you’re going to going to get killed so don’t do that like and and that’s what it’s designed to do it’s designed to say hey here’s how you succeed by not expressing the reward of of success when you have failure right and so there’s even studies that show people who are depressed often have like the habul is not working in the same way it’s perceiving failure even before it happens so then you don’t even try right and then if you think about the way people who are depressed feel as an example they think about it as there’s no way out there’s never going to be a way out I’m never going to succeed like this is going to last forever that’s like the symptom of depression and the habenula is involved in that so generally the I the and the studies that have been done and there’s this woman whose Name Escapes Me we’ll put it in the show notes but her name escapes me she um she’s in one of the Stanford labs and and what she’s discovered is that people who are successful and I think the way her study went was we’ll we’ll put it in in case I’ve got some of this wrong but the way her study went was she went into populations that didn’t have a lot of resources and look to see who actually lost weight when they tried and the people who lost weight when they tried their mindset was never I failed their mindset was what’s the next iteration what’s the next thing we do what’s the next attempt it’s a constant iterative mindset which you see in Silicon Valley as well fail fast is another one like the idea is that everything that you’re doing is an iteration it’s an attempt and it’s a reframing of failure to experimentation and if you look at like the way our courses are designed we’re teaching folks that it’s not about failure it’s about iteration we do experiments we don’t say here’s an exercise here’s what you have to learn we talk about want over should because should if I should do it and I don’t do it then I failed and so that creates a situation where oh I’m trying to get out of a bad habit and then that moment where you go back to the bad habit you don’t see it as an iteration you don’t see it as a pendulation you’re like oh I failed and then I’m going to stop trying what I’m hearing there is that learning is going to happen either way we’re you know we’re evolved to learn no matter what happens but what we learn depends on what we make of it and failure is something that will however we Define failure failure causes us to learn to stop trying that thing which is ultimately keeps us very safe if it’s well calibrated correct as we become more complex you know adults how does our sense of failure change from when we become when when we’re children if we’re if we’re a child we might only be able to recognize a certain level of complexity of you know the the definition of a task and whether or not we succeeded or failed and so I wonder to what extent that kind of carries forward into our adulthood and that’s kind of what part of what needs to be deprogrammed and kind of re reprocessed in in the work the idea is how do you get into an iterative mindset how do you redefine or reframe failure that’s the important part so if you look at kids one of the main things that they have for their reward system like what’s the cheese at the end of their maze it’s Mom and Dad’s love and attention that’s or love and attention generally yeah right so if they keep on failing at getting that if they keep on failing at getting the Attunement that they need that if they keep on failing to get the connection that they need if they keep on failing to get the love that they need then they grow up with this incredibly critical voice in the head telling them that they’re failing all the time even when they’re not I’ll give you an example of this my father was the CEO of a company and that company fired him and then he got a job as another CEO of a company and at the end of that the owners of the company which was another company so he was the parent company basically fired him and said you failed and my dad was just like I’m a failure and his whole life just like went down the tubes that’s when he started drinking heavily and everything he did went wrong and it was just like it was horrible like just a horrible thing and later on in life I’m a venture capitalist and I am walking around this trade show looking for Investments and there’s this company it’s called Loom energy and I was like huh that sounds a lot like the company my Dad ran called Lumin Optics so I went over I was like what do you guys do and they told me this is what we do I was like wow this sounds like a company called Lumin Optics they’re like oh that’s who we used to be I was like really like like well my dad used to you know run the company and they’re like oh John Hudson yeah what I found out was that my dad was so successful at running the company that the parent company that didn’t want this company to exist because it was a competitive product to their main you know manufacturing facilities and everything like that basically shelf the company and they said yeah no and these folks sued the parent company won $100 million or something say you shelf up it was a breach of contract and so they lost $100 million and now with this new $100 million they restarting the company wow that and so my dad’s entire life went downhill because he thought he failed when he actually hadn’t failed and and and and so I started to ask for the numbers literally I’m like what happened like and and I started asking for the numbers and I went and talked to my dad about it too I was like like tell me the numbers and he basically turned a company that was losing something it was like burning $300,000 and he had turned that around to only burning 10,000 in less than 10 two years and their revenue had increased by something like 3 or 400% so it was definitely on the right trajectories and I was like your whole life defined by a failure that didn’t actually exist and so that’s this the crazy thing is like especially somebody who’s depressed you know they can look at anything and turn it into a failure they can look at anything and say oh this is C I didn’t 6C I didn’t it wasn’t perfect cuz nothing’s perfect nothing is perfect that you can look at anything and say see I wasn’t perfect I failed yeah and how did that impact you how old were you when this occurred and your dad started to see himself as a failure yeah it was about the seventh grade 8th grade some somewhere in there maybe ninth grade is when it started happening heavily yeah I mean the alcoholism that at least to some degree was propelled by it he was a heavy drinker already that whole like shame cycle that he went into yeah I like lost my dad even more than I had already lost my dad what actually usually happens is that like he would take his own self anger out on me so he yelled at me for hour and a half over the dinner table every night it was crazy this one idea one idea that he failed where he could have been like oh I succeeded and those those guys like you tried to hamstring me because of the success that I was having if he had that thought process he’s like I’m a successful CEO my life his life my sister my mom’s all everybody’s life would be different the crazy thing is is that so I’ve seen people do something where they do the like power positive thinking and so they don’t look at the reality on the ground right but I don’t think that’s about failure and non-failure that’s about like overoptimism or not wanting to feel your negative emotions it’s like a completely different thing so yeah you’re going to be disappointed yeah you’re going to be sad yeah like I have been a venture capitalist I’ve had companies that I love that have not succeeded I had to mourn it’s not about like no everything’s going to be okay it’s not a polanish thing but it’s also looking at that and saying yeah that was an iteration a company did not succeed what did I learn how does this how does my next iteration change because of that like if I’m solving a problem I’m going to fail if it’s a a complicated problem I’m going to fail many many many times and if I see them as failure I’m going to stop I’m not going to want to solve the problem if I see them as iteration if I see them as a series of experiments where I’m learning then I’m always winning I’m never failing because I’m always learning and that iterative mindset is like the important thing and it and the iterative mindset particularly I will say when it comes to personal transformation it’s not just did this work did this not work what am I going to iterate on it’s like sometimes it’s how long it works right there I remember many times where I would try a tool and then it would stop working it worked and then it would stop working and then it worked and then it stop working then it worked and then it stop working and it took me a long time to realize that the reason that the tools stopped working were almost always the same and it was because they went from Wonder and inquiry and like what is going on here to oh I can manage myself through this tool yeah and as soon as I tried to manage myself I wasn’t actually welcoming my experience and the tool stopped working and so there was this recognition of even even the idea of I need to manage myself sets up failure because at some point you can’t always manage yourself you’re going to fail and then the whole thing goes apart where if it’s like oh it’s just an exploration I’m just learning then the tools keep on working something that I’m noticing here is that in in the instances you were talking about like what your what Your Dad could have learned from that experience what we could have learned from any experience that we labeled as failure or what we could have learned from an experience that we were kind of polyanic kind of grazing over the top of is that there’s a lot more subtle to to reality than we previously had modeled and to get there there’s a lot of emotions we have to feel we have to sit with that complexity sounds like what we’re talking about here with failure it’s like a inverse polyana where it’s like I don’t want to feel all of what I have to feel perhaps your dad might have had to actually recognize that he had succeeded and that wasn’t actually enough for the company because other forces outside of his control were were happening and there’d be heartbreak in that and so how much is failure or this idea of failure like the the perhaps the premature idea of failure or the simplistic story of failure that prevents us from really getting The Full Experience how much is that a protection or Identity or avoiding an emotional experience the interesting thing is like if you bring that all the way into where it goes really deep like in depression where the person’s like why even get up why even live right because I’m just it’s just going to all be shit that’s how far this thing goes right like everything I’ve done is failure why even get up why now I is just it I’m just going to kill myself right I’m going to like is that an identity that’s a great question like you know what what’s actually happening there leaving that place I’m sure is going to be scary right and so somehow or another being where you are even if it’s hell is somehow more comforting than being in someplace new if you feel like you’re failing don’t try and so to me I I would say that the emotional avoidance is is something that is really important and is going to allow you to succeed and reframing failure is something that’s really important and is going to allow you to succeed I mean I’ve told this story before know I have a a guy who cuts my hair who’s this great artist and I’ve done this many times now and he wasn’t being able to sell in Galleries and I said to him look hey man I’ll give you a thousand bucks if you get whatever I can’t remember anymore 2550 rejections inside of a month or two or whatever it was every failure was a success that reframe he was like oh I’m closer to getting to my goal of $1,000 and then now he’s like a working artist because Gallery said yes but the reframe was I am winning if I get failures that’s all he needed was that reframe so now I’m curious for you know for listeners here I’m hearing like a number of possible entry points for for doing this work one of them is taking an inventory or account of like what stories do you have of failure like there’s and then there’s the explicit ones that you tell yourself every day and then there’s implicit ones that have just be kind of become kind of baked into the subconscious like I’m just not that kind of person I’m not an artist because somebody didn’t like my art once because I failed when I was a kid yeah exactly to start with that with the Excavating of failure stories what’s what’s something that listeners could do as a practice or as an experiment to start to excavate those stories to investigate them more deeply yeah I think is the investigation but I’m not sure how necessary that is for reframing let’s say you’ve always tried to lose weight and you haven’t succeeded as an example what we normally do is we say oh we’re going to do this diet we’re going to try x amount of time goes by then we fail in some way and we give up right next time you want to lose weight sit down and write 50 experiments you can run about losing weight I’m going to do an atic diet I’m going to do a a traditional Chinese medicine diet I’m going to do the Atkins diet I’m going to try this exercise this exercise this exercise I’m going to like literally like I’m going to count calories oh I’m going to control my blood sugar I’m going to wear a blood sugar monitor I’m going to work with my hormones like there’s so many ideas and I of how to lose weight write down every experiment that you’re going to do and then do them in order oh so now oh I failed at that it becomes oh I tried that now I’m going to try this and what do I learn what am I going to try this what am I going to learn and each one of those is going to teach you something about your situation about how you think about food about how you think about weight about how you think about exercise how do I enjoy it I’m this week I’m going to exercise but my number one job is to enjoy it this week I’m going to exercise and and I’m going to try to do like the heaviest cardio that I can do this week it’s all going to be about weight and strength whatever like just experiment after experiment so to me more important than going back into and Excavating the ideas of failure which I think is important is to start to get a taste of what it is to reframe the idea of failure because once you have that then the exploration I think is much easier than if you are going to explore stuff but you don’t have a taste of what it is to have an iterative mindset yeah yeah and when I say excavation one of those one of the reasons for that is simply so you have something to reframe like because a lot of that could be subconscious oh yeah yeah so I would say the first place to reframe that’s great the first place to reframe is the thing that you want to do next is that thing that you want in life that you’ve been not able to achieve whether that is like finding a lover finding a husband or a wife losing weight starting a business blah blah blah like take whatever that thing is that’s been hard for you that you don’t want to go out and do because you feel like you fail every time you do it and come up with 50 or 60 iterations that you can try let’s say somebody does this work they they do some reframing you know a lot of times people will continue to self-sabotage what they think they want and it’ll be a fear of success that’s actually underneath that sabotage how do you how would you relate the fear of success to the propensity to develop a story of failure so I think to some degree the iterative mindset helps with the fear of success because every time you’re iterating you’re starting to taste success not success in the goal because there’s no more goal right like the whole thing about iterative mindset is that you kind of have a North star you’re like oh I want to up here but the way I’m going to get there isn’t by getting there my the way I’m going to get there is just learning I’m just going to learn enough that eventually that problem gets solved if you’re like trying to solve a puzzle and you’re and you come into that puzzle and you’re like I want to solve this puzzle I want to solve this puzzle I want to solve this puzzle the impartiality of you goes away and you’re just going to be like get frustrated and more frustrated I don’t want to do this anymore right but if you’re like oh I’m just here to learn about the puzzle what is this what is that how do I do this how do I do that eventually that puzzle get solved it just does eventually you’re going to learn enough where they just the awareness just the learning is going to solve the problem for you and so the more that you can have your Northstar as like this thing out there but your objective in the the partiality you have is just to learn not to get to the end the quicker the whole process goes I I love how a lot of what you’re saying here in the reframing is that you’re reframing the criteria for Success from an outcome to a process like I’m succeeding if I’m iterating I’m succeeding if I’m learning and I trust that if I’m iterating and I’m learning I’m going to get a better result tracing this back to the fear of success I think a lot of times a fear of success is actually a projected future fear of failure like what if my art ends up in Galleries and then I’m judged that’s a huge part of it and there’s also the part of the emotional experience of like oh my God I’m winning I feel good like that is scary it’s scary to have really positive emotions and and you know you can see it the like pleasures of available to us at any minute any day just by the way that we breathe and most people are not experiencing it because it’s a little bit scary so I do think that those are the two main things that make the fear of success happen is that expansive feeling that is overwhelming and oh now I’m going to be able to fail on a bigger stage as people start to work with a different way of being often we’ll try that new way of being and then something will happen and we’ll revert back to an old one and so one way that that might look is somebody’s like okay you know what I’m going to start experimenting I’m to try to get a bunch of rejections and then they step out there and they get a particularly painful possibly public rejection and then that they just go straight back into the failure there’s like an implosion how how can somebody be ready for that or be prepared for such a moment where they’ve changed their way of being and then all of a sudden they step on a rake and have that experience and be able to reframe even that without imploding that’s where some emotional fluidity is really really useful the framing itself self that’s stepping on a Rake The Rake that you step on means that your reframing really wasn’t complete I’ll give you an example of this one of the things you’ll notice about all of our work is that we never talk about self-improvement we only talk about self-awareness or self realization or understanding yourself the reason we do that is because you will fail at self-improvement like the the framing of self-improvement is failure is there will be a failure in it self-awareness you can’t fail at you just keep on learning and iterating so if that rake happens it means somewhere in the reframe the reframing hasn’t been complete right and so or there’s an emotion that you don’t want to feel right so there there’s still going to be disappointment there’s still going to be sadness there’s still going to be you know like all the all the feelings of fear and all that stuff there’s there they’re not going away with the reframing and so it’s still really important to feel them and to process them and to let them all move through as we talk about in other podcasts and so if you step on the breake feel the emotion that you need to feel and then go back to the list and that’s why I say put that list up front if you put that list up front before you attempt do your first thing write that whole list down because then it’s just like oh what’s the next experiment and frame it so that every time you make a check on an experiment it’s a win like you’re checking off a task list you know every one of those is a win so it’s like that it’s like oh win win win yeah and feel the emotions that you have to feel on the way through I think that’s something to watch for too if people try these iterations in these experiments and they continue to have the same stories of failure come back out of it then it’s probably a sign that there’s some emotional experience that you have been creating a little wall around with that story of failure and that’s something to explore a lot of the time the story of failure is designed to not allow you to feel a certain emotion that’s the thing with depression we talk about like one of the main things that I’ve seen work to have people move through depression is allow their anger to move and so a lot of the time what that what’s doing that feeling of failure is doing is making it so you don’t have to get angry at Mom and Dad for not being attuned to not loving always being critical you know and so like because you couldn’t feel that as a kid because they they would just annihilate you if you’re freaking 2 foot tall and there’s a 6 foot tall person yelling at you that’s not a place where anger is safe to go and it may even be protecting you from losing the idea of an ideal parent like losing that ideal I failed in earning their love then that’s perhaps easier the world is less unsafe to me than me taking on the belief at age 4 that my parents are just as confused as as as I am right now the world is not safe even in the way that it’s supposed to be for me correct yeah this thing goes so deep the most horrific story that I have around this still makes me sad to talk about it is I was in my 20s I was recording an album and met this guy who was restoring habitat named Fred and now like the Godfather of my child and he had a guy working for him who was an amazing human being you know just amazing he at some point was like living in his car on meth in the drug game and turned his life around and he was a loving human being being he had kids who were generous who were openhearted he took in kids from other homes like if there was like a kid that he found and even though they didn’t have money they were always like yeah you just come in live in the garage like and so they had their family they had other kids from the area that didn’t have good parents and like just and and like when I went over to his house the first time his 8-year-old offered me his toy he’s like here’s the toy like you can have it he was just providing this amazing nest of and he just really cared about his kids and his eldest son which was I think the the son that kind of brought him out of his meth Haze and and Drug Haze when he was like 17 noticed he was drinking too much noticed that there was a problem and he started he went to he said Hey Dad I want to go to rehab I want to do therapy and his dad saw that as a failure I I failed I like my son was supposed to I was I did all this work and my son is still is having problems he’s going to repeat the life that I had I remember talking to him I’m like dude I don’t think you screwed up I think like for a kid to be able to see that they needed that and ask for it for themselves like that’s a huge win and he was like no that’s total failure inside of a year he was back on meth and he was living in a car again I saw the wife maybe like a year later and she was just like yeah they they didn’t have the money cuz he was providing and so the whole family fell apart because he had idea that he failed wasn’t even a true thing this is something that’s in the water we swim in in culture and often shows up in companies and it can be in families like like you were just describing I’m curious now how much the son feels like he failed because the father went that way and it was a result of his blah blah blah what can somebody who’s let’s say who’s a leader in a team or a parent running an organization anything when somebody’s kind of in charge of the culture or at least curating what’s that this can be brought into into a company culture or a or a group the most important one is to like frame the thing from the beginning is that there can’t be fail failure so like the my best example of this is I think it was like Nike in the ’90s over there like you’d walk into their main Seattle headquarters and they had a 4x8 so like the size of a piece of plywood sign all done by push pin and there was black push pins and white push pins and it just said fail bigger immediately you walk in and they have framed success as large failures like boom like so so any way you can do the framing up front this is an IT process fail fast fail you know fail often fail fast learning like just to see everything in that way to set a up a goal even I’ve seen people set up goals of iterations instead of we’re going to get here we’re going to run seven iterations it’s the same thing in like tracking sales data are you tracking how much money they brought in eventually you’re going to have to but the best thing to track is how many phone calls they made the best thing to track is how many moves down a pipeline did they make you’re creating success in something that they can actually do instead of something that is somewhat beyond their control so it’s like oh if you take these steps you will get here so we’re going to we’re going to talk about the iteration of these steps rather than the like long-term goal for for the for the metrics so framing it from the beginning is one way to do it second is to reward failure and I’ve seen this in companies who had the biggest failure like the most bold failure who’s the one who tried something and actually reward that if you if you truly understand this that is not a scary thing to do that is a no-brainer like you want Innovation from your company and you know The Innovation is going to cost you money this is the way it costs you money is people trying stuff everybody has their own set of experiments so to reward that I think is like an amazing thing to do the other thing is don’t get angry when people mess up in our company recently we had well I guess it was a couple years ago now but that somebody made a $50,000 mistake I walked into the office and they’re like oh I’m so sorry Joe I think I made 50 I just said no problem there was Zero emotional backlash for me there was just like yeah wow that sucks okay how are we going to handle it and I imagine there was some anger to process at some point somehow no there wasn’t I was you never had a moment in this particular case for them yeah definitely not for me because because of my reframing on it is so strong there’ll be anger if I don’t see progress being made right if if I get frustrated if I don’t see the pace but if I see someone trying something and it doesn’t work or somebody making a mistake I’m totally good with it I’m not good with the fact that that pace isn’t being kept that’s what will cause me frustration maybe like a mistake being made two or three times in a row for no like not that’s a whole different thing nobody wants to make mistakes so if they’re making a mistake it means they’re most likely trying something and and that’s an important part of how we grow as a business this seems like another clear example of reframing reframing success from outcomes to process to learnings even down to principles it sounds like a lot of what you’re just describing here is like if if the principles are being followed if we’re if we’re living by the principles then we can consider that a success and if if we’re not getting the results we want then we can examine the principles yeah and that I think that’s a big thing like in families it’s especially families with young kids you know so Esme and I talked about this on our podcast recently about her talking seeing like a family like correcting their kids from doing the dishes they’re doing the dishes and then they correct them and so for that kid they’re learning that they’re failure they’re learning that they can’t even wash dishes without being corrected that’s a like a deeply disempowering move that people make so it’s really important that when you’re working in a family situation that the iteration is far more important than the success I do that with my kids all the time like even if if they mess up on something sometimes I’m like I just don’t even say anything maybe I’ll go back and fix it but I won’t let them know about it or maybe I’ll be like hey you know here’s this other component you know do you want to think about doing that how do you want to do that but I’m not going to criticize I’m not going to step in and do it it just doesn’t help them have the self-esteem doesn’t help them be empowered doesn’t help them learn you know none of that works at least for normal life I maybe when it comes to like being the best celloist in the world there’s some criticism needed I don’t know but well critique I say which might be different which might be different yeah but for just normal life it’s not really required know and then the other thing is like with families is if you notice like little kids their hands don’t go over their heads the way like a an adult does they’re like their wrists kind of go to like their ears when they’re small enough right and so you can imagine that when our kids were like I don’t know 2 and a half 3 years old they were setting the table the table was higher than them they were holding the dish above their head and then sliding it onto the table and to us that was really important it was really important for them to know that they were capable and yeah we broke imagine we broke some dishes we broke some dishes you like but like to to us it that was the framing the framing was the attempt was more important than the success yeah one thing that I’m imagining this could all bump up against in somebody is a fear of recklessness if I were to try this on then I might become Reckless and if I were to do that as like a bass jumper I’m like oh you know what I’m just going to try and fail a bunch of things then that might actually lead to my death what would you have to say to somebody who’s like but what I do is really high stakes tens of thousands of people depend on this getting right because I’m running a big company or whatever I can’t afford to be Reckless just to say on the base jumping side just as a great example that you you framed you’ve already framed it so that that you can’t fail or that when you fail you’re dead anyway so like it doesn’t really matter right if I live then it was a success so walk away you’ve already done the reframing as a way to like that that’s the nature how people go and do things like base jumping is they reframe failure and so you you’ve already done it so I just point that out there is this thing like you know if I make this decision then the economy of the Free World could collapse right then like like do some experiments like find you know find a very small democracy and try to do the financial engineering there do it within a company like the the idea is how do I run the simplest experiment that I can learn the most in the shortest amount of time when you are practicing you you better be iterating you better be trying over and over and over again there’s a lot of interesting research on this how how important it is to go back and forth between like performance and play performance and play performance and play and in something like like Wing suiting people often think wow there’s no margin for error really there’s lots of margin for error there’s just specific margins that you need to maintain and then within those margins there’s actually a lot that you can do what you do in that space is what increases your capacity your skill your awareness your body awareness and yeah and everything else I love that because that’s even the idea performance and play basically means a place where you can fail and a place where you can’t fail and so play in itself like when you watch kids no one’s like I failed at playing like kids adults might do that I didn’t have enough fun generally like kids don’t fail at playing and they’re constantly learning and they’re growing and they learn and grow really really quickly because they’re in this state of play all the time and there’s a huge amount of data now that shows that like how important it is for kids to have free play time when we say connection over Perfection it’s the exact same thing we’re reframing it when we say wants over should it’s the exact same thing we’re saying like you can’t fail in your wants you can fail in the shoulds you can fail in Perfection you can’t fail in connection it’s like everything we do is built is reframing the experience that way no that if that got taken away we would not get the results that we get because it’s like we’re just sitting there experimenting and learning and it’s and it’s why like it is the entire system that I did and that I was lucky enough to do because I just hated Authority and I just got really lucky that that is just a really that iterative mindset is just very very productive and very very enjoyable too one last observation on this topic of reframing is that what what this does essentially is it brings the enjoyment of play into the you know performance of high stakes as deeply as as one can which just deepens the learning and the and the enjoyment and ultimately doesn’t have to sacrifice performance it can increase in deep it doesn’t yeah it doesn’t it doesn’t it does the exact opposite especially over the long term yeah like especially over the time frame of years or decades there’s this great quote I think I heard it I think I heard it from Tony Robbins and it was people always overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade and if you look at like what the iterative mindset does in a decade like every company that I know that has disrupted a industry inside of a decade has been very very iterative in their approach maybe you don’t lose weight this year but you will be healthy if you constantly iterate on your health the great example of this is Mark who works with us like when you talk to him about his health it’s just like a thousand iterations he has done over decades and you look at him you’re like holy crap that dude is so healthy and this episode is another example of our iterative process yes it is thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment to hear more about how to use failure to your advantage you can join our newsletter or check out our courses at artof accomplishment.