There’s two layers of meaning to this. The first layer is clear enough. If you wish to get an A in your class, you cannot get that by avoiding failure (which means wanting to avoid an F). In that case, you’ll simply get a D or at most a C. It’s common sense and most people will understand that. But there’s a second, much deeper level that most people miss completely.
The second layer is so hard to see because most people don’t want to see it. To accept this second layer is to also accept that some principles in your life that you feel are *instinctively *true… would be false.
So what is this second layer that holds such deep implications?
The second layer
The second layer of meaning is that: the path of success and failure are one and the same.
The opposite of success is not failure, it is inaction.
If you don’t want to succeed, the only sure way to do it is to not do anything at all. When you don’t play the game, you can’t win. If you don’t go to the exams or don’t bother answering the questions, you definitely can’t get a good grade.
The meaning of the previous sentence is much deeper. It means that the path to success is the same path as failure. To fully accept the meaning of the second layer, you also have to accept that life is ultimately unfair, that if you go on the path to success, you can do everything right until you almost reach the finish line, then still fail. You have to accept that people who succeed and fail may put in the same effort (or the ones who fail may even put in more) but that ultimately it is luck that decides whether you fail or succeed.
Hard to swallow isn’t it?
If you mind is already rejecting what I just said, don’t bother reading further. I understand that for some (most people), it’s very hard to accept that we don’t have full control over our own lives. It’s weird though. I think everyone always says:
Life is unfair!
but they don’t actually mean it. They don’t actually accept that it’s true. Rather, it’s more of a complaint. If everyone is saying this (perhaps multiple times), then perhaps there’s actually some truth to it? And if it’s really true, the next question that you should ask isn’t about how to fight it. The next question is what you should do once you realize you can’t change it. You should aim for success anyway.
So why do I say that the paths of success and failure are the same?
Here’s a short example.** Avoiding failure, Case #1**: There’s a guy who runs a business. It’s a nice business and all, and has quite good demand because he’s a nice guy and everyone trusts him not to cheat them. But he has a mindset of avoiding failure. So even though he has good demand, he only hires 10 people to work for him because he’s worried that hiring more would bring extra costs that he might not be able to pay. So his workers are kept fully busy the whole day, and he makes full use of his workers. However, it also means that his customers often have to wait due to the backlog of orders. One by one, they start moving away because of the slow customer service.
On the other hand, he could also have hired 30 people and made sure that the orders were processed extremely fast. But in his mind, he starts thinking that:
if the orders are solved so fast, then my 30 workers will be sitting around doing nothing for a few hours every day. That’s a waste of my money!
That mindset is a mindset of avoiding risk. It’ll be a risk on whether he’ll generate enough business to compensate for hiring 20 extra workers, but if he doesn’t he’s already doomed himself. He CAN’T succeed when he only has 10 workers. And it’s all because of his mindset of avoiding failure.
This means that if you avoid failure, it also means that you avoid success.
The best way to go towards possible success (and possible failure) is to hire more workers.
Why can’t I just avoid failure, then work harder later?
“But wait“, you think, “if I’m avoiding failure by doing just the bare minimum, all I have to do to reach success is to just work harder right?”
Sorry bro. That’s a myth. Let me break it down.
Avoiding failure, Case #2: The strategy to avoid failure in class is very simple. Study for your exams. That means taking past year papers and doing them until you know exactly how to answer those questions. That should easily get you past 60% of the questions in your finals. This is avoiding failure. This works because when your mindset is to avoid failure, the strategies you use are ultimately shortcuts, trying to just do the techniques without bothering to understand them. So you’d think that to aim for success, you should then just do **even more **of those past year questions right? Not so. If you do that, you’ll never be able to answer the higher level questions that require you to fully understand the context of the question.
When your strategy is to aim for success, then your goal is different from the very start. You want to know exactly why you’re doing these things and when the best times are to use the techniques you learnt. You’ll then be able to answer the tough questions (that test you exactly for that).
To compare that to the businessman just now, if he had a mindset of aiming for success, his goal wouldn’t be to ensure that his business just survives. His goal would be to make his business so big that he can open more branches in the future. In that case, hiring 30 workers is a no-brainer (a choice that is obvious) because he can easily use them in his new branches in the future.
When you avoid failure, the strategies and the very mindset you use is different. It’s extremely hard to change someone’s mindset (even if it looks so easy to change). Ask anyone who smokes how hard it is to change your mindset.
So it means that you can’t just “work harder” to achieve success. I’m sure you’ve heard of the quote:
Don’t work hard, work smart.
Well… this is kinda what it means. If you use the strategy of those who avoid failure, it doesn’t matter how hard you work. The most you’ll ever do is avoid failure.
To reach success, you’ll have to take some risks, work smart and ultimately use the mindset of those who aim for success.
Minimizing risks
Risky risky risky! It’s so risky to aim for success if you say it’s the same path as failure!
So if I say that the path of possible success is also the path of possible failure… then what do I do?
What you do is you maximize the chance of success while minimizing the chance of failure. This can happen through so many ways. All the ways that you’ve traditionally learnt. These include learning new skills, doing research on the subject, asking insiders for info about what’s really going on, etc.
I won’t go too much into that. The main idea though, is that even if the path of success and failure are the same, and luck ultimately decides if you make it or not, there are many things you can do to improve your chances. But you HAVE to understand that you are only improving your chances.
There is no guarantee that you’ll succeed even if you work hard.
This is not to stop you from working hard. Rather, it’s for you to realize that the world is not fair and therefore there is no point in complaining. Don’t complain the world isn’t fair. Don’t complain that God isn’t fair. Don’t complain that you deserve something better because you’re such a nice person. Life is NOT fair. Death is.
The only thing to do when you fail is to get back up and try again.
So don’t avoid failure. Aim for success. And if you fail anyway? No worries bro. I won’t blame it on you. Good effort. Try again. Let’s meet up when we both finally succeed.