Success is NOT a Straight Line: Use "Failure" As Feedback

Hey all, just some quick thoughts that I was having earlier today. Especially if you're new to the scene of fitness, nutrition etc... with whatever goal you may have.

A really important perspective to have any time you set out to reach a particular goal I think, is to basically be able to separate your ego from the process and to be able to look at setbacks and even flat out regression as just being nothing more than forms of feedback that you can use to adjust your actions moving forward.

For a lot of people, when they don't seem to be making progress toward a particular goal, they'll tend to look at that and automatically say things like, "I guess there's something wrong with ME", "maybe I'm not cut out for this", "I failed", rather than saying what's actually much more likely true, which is just that "there's something wrong with the set of actions that I'm taking", "there's something wrong with my plan that needs to be changed", "it's not ME, it's my approach".

You should already know any time you make the decision to reach a certain goal, whether it's with fitness or business or some sort of social goal or anything else, that there absolutely 100% are going to be obstacles and setbacks along the way.

You should already know this for sure at the very outset before you get started, and so it shouldn't be any surprise at all when they show up and it shouldn't be any reason to get discouraged or to stop.

It's not going to be a "straight line" to your goal, and if you can't accept that before starting then you might as well not even bother because that's what it's going to look like.

People make the mistake of thinking that those plateaus or those regressions are "failures", when in reality it's all just part of one single process.

There's no actual failure unless you stop and you give up because then you're 100% guaranteed to never get there, but as long as you keep going and you just keep adjusting and adapting to the feedback you're getting, then there's no question of "failure" because when you do reach that end goal, again, it's all just part of one process.

It's like this with all areas of life. For example, anybody who has learned to play a musical instrument (I play a bit of guitar so I know what that's like,), you were probably completely terrible when you first started. You could barely even hold your hands in the right place, but that didn't bother you because you expected that that was going to be the case when you got started, it was a new skill that you had to learn.

But you tried one thing and you "failed" and then you adjusted based on that, and then you tried another thing and you "failed" and you adjusted based on that, and you just kept going and going and going and using those little "failures" as feedback and then eventually over time you got better and you learned to play proficiently.

So it's like that with everything else in life, again, fitness, business, school, your social life, sports, whatever it is.

It's a messy process to get from A to B, and you should expect that right from the start, and you should just treat every challenge that shows up as being new information that you can then use to adjust your plan moving forwrad until you eventually get to your goal.

And that's why you hear quotes like, "hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard" or things like that, which is true because a lot of the time it's not the most naturally skilled people or the most intelligent people that accomplish their goals and follow through on things, it's literally just people who stick to things and just keep going and going and going both when things are going well and when they're not.

The right formula to get to where you want to go already exists, it's already out there, and so it's just a matter of having the perseverance to just keep adapting and adjusting until you land on that right formula.