We have all heard that failure will happen on the road to success, but it doesn’t make it any more comfortable to experience it. After having a moment of painful recognition that my fear of failing and being embarrassed has held me back from taking as many shots as I need to in order to find the success I truly want, I knew that my own behavior had to change.

In order for my own behavior to change, I realized I needed to reframe failure.

In order to reframe failure, I had to force myself to become desensitized to it.

In order to become desensitized to it, I needed to seek it out as frequently and consistently as possible.

In order to seek it out as frequently and consistently as possible, I needed to make racking up failures the goal in and of itself.

In order to stick to this goal of racking up failures, I needed to create a method of keeping track of failures, and reframing them to feel like successes.

In order to reframe them to feel like successes, I needed to create a system of social support (or positive peer pressure, so that I would feel more embarrassed to not stick to my goal of racking up failures than to experience the failures themselves).

So there you go. If you would like to help support this goal, even just asking about my latest failures or how my blog is going is a tremendous help, because it will be giving me the feedback I need to gain momentum and keep reaching for opportunities to fail. I don’t want to let you down.

The Fail Report will update weekly on Saturdays at 10 a.m. with the failures of the week.

If you want some stories of really successful people who have started to reshape the way I think about failure, you can find them in the faillies page.

Thanks for reading and happy failing this 2024!