What a bummer. Spent the better portion of an hour constructing a blog post that was pretty sweet. Unfortunately my computer decided to lose the network connection and when I saved I was hit with the dreaded “Page Not Found”, effectively losing the whole thing. I’m kind of frustrated at the moment so I will summarize for the sake of my sanity…

I’m actually working on something kind of exciting that’s *almost* finished, but since it’s not I’ll have to give you some sort of filler to knock off a few posts until it is. Heh.

The biggest detriments to my success have always been self doubt and fear. It’s not a lack of skill in a certain area, not a lack of motivation, not a lack of effort - nope. It’s always been straight up self sabotage. I’m willing to bet that that’s how most of us are. The guys that get ahead are basically the guys that just don’t give a shit if they fail. They just plow through idea after idea until something works.

But what are we really afraid of? Loss of money? Loss of time? These two things were among my biggest fears for such a long time. To think that I could spend 6 months and many thousands on a project and have it flop was just too scary for my brain to even fully fathom. As a result, I quit time and time again on a countless number of projects simply because I was afraid that they *could* fail.

Obviously, that sort of mindset is absolutely detrimental to any forward progress. Fear turns to anger if you give it a long enough time to brew, and I found myself so aggravated and mad at… myself… that I started forcing myself to finish projects and started attacking things with the emotion of a cold piece of steel.

And you know what happened? I started to succeed.

We hear the statistics all the time - 8 out of every 10 businesses fail. OK. Well, guess what, 100/100 projects will fail if you never give them a chance to see the light of day. You will never succeed until you allow yourself to succeed. Stop it already with the self - sabotage!

You only need to have one project succeed to make the 999999 failures worth it. Your homework is to go out there and fail. Fail so many times that it becomes a joke. Laugh at yourself. Remove the fear. And then do it again. Plow through those ideas and put yourself to work. Robotic. Emotionless. Fearless.

Never risk more than you can afford to lose. Abide by that and failures will always be minor setbacks and not life changing depressions.

I know what it’s like to see those around you succeeding. I know what it’s like to read about people doing this and that. I know the feeling that wells up inside an individual when all he desires is the freedom that comes with success. You know it’s out there, it’s just out of reach. It may take 10 years to achieve… but when it comes it comes hard and it comes strong… and those 10 years of struggle will be well worth the effort. Trust me.

So get to work.