When people procrastinate it is often because they have a fear of failure. Look at it this way, if you never finish (or even better, never start!) a project then you can’t fail at it can you?
Yet what you can do is talk about it as an option. You can plan it in your mind. You can focus on it and know that one day it will be a great success and visualise the wonderful end result, willing it towards you. You write it down or maybe put together some images that represent its success. That’s all very well but where is the real action?
I heard about the concept of ‘fail fast’ a year or so ago and loved it. It’s all about how you can’t see what works and what doesn’t until you actually do it. So say you decide to test a new headline on your website. If it does work, great! Or maybe it just needs some tweaks so again, take action and find out one way or another. If it fails, i.e. doesn’t work, then you know and you can move on to the next thing to try.
Think about it. The longer you wait to do it you’re loosing out more and more. If it does work then you could have succeeded and benefited so much faster. If it doesn’t work then you know for sure and are in a position to apply that learning in the future with your next attempt or project.
If you haven’t failed you haven’t lived. An old friend of mine said many years ago that if he wasn’t in trouble occasionally he wasn’t doing his job properly!
I’ve heard it said that it's not the person who fails that is the failure but the person who never starts... What if you changed the word failure to something else? What if when you had a failure you used another word instead? What about error, boob, slip up, blunder, miscalculation, disappointment, malfunction or letdown instead?
With this approach in mind, I decided to adopt this saying and tweak it to be more positive, hence it’s now ‘Succeed Fast!’ and applied to anything and everything in my life, from relationships to marketing tactics.
My question for you is: "What might you have not started or finished that would benefit from you adopting this philosophy too?"
