Yes, You Can Still Become Successful After Failing 2,600 Times

Making a mistake, failing at your goal, or giving up when you just don’t have the emotional energy to keep going — it’s tough! It can be embarrassing. You might want to hide out so you don’t have to face anyone. Look, we get it, okay? But we want you to know something today.

People rarely remember the strikeouts. In the beginning, when you don’t meet your goal, it seems like all anyone thinks about when they see you is what you didn’t manage to do. But you should know that we could catastrophize things in our minds.

Through the rest of us, the goals that we haven’t met, especially when we’ve told people about them hang over our heads like a heavy dark cloud. We’re prone to negativity bias. We fixate on our mistakes because negative emotions and situations have a greater impact than the positive ones.

Our minds will draw attention toward bad news more frequently than good news, and it can have a powerful effect on your behavior, decisions, relationships, and especially your mistakes. Think about a mistake that you’ve made recently.

• It could be an error you made at work that cost the company money or your colleague's time.
• It could be a mistake, or you forgot to pick your children up.

• It could be a mistake that you forgot that your spouse doesn’t eat pasta, and guess what, you made mac ’n’ cheese for supper.

It can be small mistakes that don’t have a strong long-term impact, but still they linger. Every time you think about them, that same anxiousness crops up, and as counterintuitive as this sounds, this negative bias is designed to help us succeed in the future.

Research shows that our brains are more motivated by the idea of losing something than it is by the idea of gaining something, which doesn’t sound like us, but think about it like this — you would be incredibly motivated by someone offering you $10,000 to do a day of work, but how motivated would you be if they said they would take away $10,000 if you don’t do two days of extra work?

Well, that threat of loss is far more powerful. It sets off more triggers in the idea of gaining something, and that’s your brain when it makes a mistake. It will fixate on the negative parts because it’s designed not to do it again in the future. It’ll remind you about the sting, the anxiousness, the vulnerability, and the embarrassment of doing something negative more than it would remind you of the positive emotions of doing something good.

Studies also show that you’re more likely to believe that mistakes are entirely your fault because they carry a heavier burden, we perceive them as more truthful and more valid because, look, our brains haven’t caught up with the world that we live in. It’s like a processing computer that’s thousands of years behind the real world. Parts of our brains are incredibly advanced, but the survival instinct part has taken a backseat to the other developments.

In the past, the people who are more attuned to danger and pay more attention to the bad things around them were simply more likely to survive. So, your anxiousness and tendency to dwell on your mistakes means that in the past you would’ve been a bad@ss warrior like a fighting kind of warrior, not a worrying warrior.

It’s not as easy as telling yourself “don’t worry, don’t dwell on your mistakes”, because look, I’m sure you’ve tried that already only to find yourself thinking about it again just two minutes later. Dwelling on your mistakes is kind of like your brain's way of dealing with them. Sometimes leaning into that feeling without fighting it can help you to process it faster.

Most importantly, realizing that other people aren’t thinking about your mistakes as much as you do can help you to get past any embarrassment that you feel about it because people remember the home runs, not the strikeouts.

Even if you are not a baseball fan, you’ve likely heard about Reggie Jackson. He played 21 seasons in Major League Baseball. He played for —

• Kansas City
• The Baltimore Orioles
• The New York Yankees
• Los Angeles Angels

He hit 536 home runs and was the American League All-Star for 14 seasons. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but he also struck out 2600 times, the most in the history of baseball. But people don’t remember that part, they remember the home runs. He was great because, despite every miss, he came back so swinging harder than ever before.

If Jackson had fixated on what people had thought about his strikeouts, he never would have had the mental space to prepare for any home run.

Whatever the mistakes that you’ve made, however, you’ve messed up in life, whatever regrets you have, take another step with the knowledge that people generally don’t give a sh*t. Those who do, they’re weird, okay? They’re just projecting their own shortcomings. As long as your next move is forward, that’s what they’re going to remember.

You may be preoccupied with your mistakes, but I promise you others aren’t. You’re the only one holding on to that sting and anxiousness. Nobody is having a pity party for you. They might sympathize with you for a few minutes, but then they’ll believe in you once again as long as you believe in yourself.

So, it’s time you start, readers. Remember your home runs, because there are plenty of them.

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