Thankfully, you’ve never done so poorly at your job that you ended up being engulfed in flames.
Well, unless your name is Dale Earnhardt Jr. – now retired super-famous NASCAR driver.
Earnhardt Jr. is the son of absolute racing legend, Dale Earnhardt Sr., who sadly passed away during the final lap of NASCAR’s “Super Bowl” – the Daytona 500 – in 2001. Just 3 years later, still fairly young in his career, Dale Jr. was still attempting to find his own way in auto racing and chose to enter a Le Mans Series race in Sonoma, CA.
While Earnhardt attempted to be competitve in the race, he lost with one of the most famous wrecks of his career. When approaching a turn, he spun out and crashed the back of his car into a wall. The resultant damage caused fuel to begin pouring out of his car and onto the track, which ignited and rapidly engulfed both the car and the driver inside.
This had to be a hard, haunting loss to take. We can be haunted by our losses too, even if they don’t involve us being in extreme physical danger. But a key to both our success and Dale’s is quickly getting past them.
You’re going to lose more than you win.
By default, every “winner” you’ve ever seen has usually lost more than they’ve won. Sports don’t usually count consistency as success – and it’s possible to win lots of games while losing the championship.
Your favorite musicians have written hundreds of songs in their careers, and probably struck only 1-2 big singles, if that.
“Big wins” are incredibly fickle and cannot be counted on. Your expectation as you apply for jobs, make sounds, make music, share social media posts, etc, should be that absolutely nothing special is going to happen.
Because, odds are, it won’t.
Your losses won’t be that painful.
In your life, you’ve failed a lot. You’ve gotten bad grades, you’ve made mistakes, you’ve done things you shouldn’t have done and said things you shouldn’t have said.
How many of them have been so painful that you deeply remember them? Probably a small handful, not hundreds. Odds are, none of them involved you being caught on fire, either.
As much as failing sucks, for the most part, it’s not that bad. Really truly, your ego can take it.
Take more at-bats.
You can begin to quit paying attention to your failures very, very easily. Just apply the wisdom you learned from your last attempt, and try again. This requires you to learn, not take things personally, and get comfortable with the idea of not being perfect.
Once you do succeed, it’s also of vital importance to celebrate your wins! Be proud of yourself, pat yourself on the back, eat good food, or buy yourself a present. Anything to memorialize the occasion will help cement the positivity of that time into your brain.
Don’t get comfortable.
While this might sound crazy, you pay attention to your failures for one big reason: it’s your comfort zone.
“But Adaaam!” you say, “How in the world can you say I’m comfortable with failing?!”
Well, I say so because it seems to be true!
When you eat at a restaurant – do you tend to order something that you know and you’re sure you’ll like, or do you intentionally order things you’ve never tried before?
Do you create familiar music and sounds with tools you’re familiar with? Do you share things in familiar ways regularly, or wildly new ones?
While you can extrapolate these examples out to the absurd – you should understand my point easily. We look at the times that we ordered weird food, or made bad music, or got a crappy review as a reason that we won’t ever ever ever do that again, over our dead bodies.
Welcome, you’ve found your comfort zone.
Don’t stay there long, your growth depends on it.
Let me hit this one more time.
- The odds are against you – you’re going to lose and fail more than you’re going to succeed
- That being said, the only way to get the big wins is to take more at-bats
- You can do that easier by depersonalizing the outcome and celebrating your wins
- The reason you’ll fight me on this is because you’re in your comfort zone
No matter what, at least you’re not on fire.
As much as that wreck sucked for Dale Jr. – he did survive. Even more crazy, he swears that he was helped out of the car by his father (though camera footage shows he crawled out on his own).
Best of all, because he didn’t count that loss in Sonoma, Dale Jr. got into a car and won a NASCAR series race at Talladega (the 2nd most famous race of that series) just weeks later.
What are you taking risks on?
I want you to know that you’re welcome to reply to any of these articles you get from me, and I’d love to hear what you’re up to. Reply, and let me know what you’re working on and what you think you can do to get around what’s holding you back.
I’m a real human, I swear, and I read all of your replies (and get back to as many as I can)
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