Failure, Habits, and Starting Over: The Truth About Success

Why Failure Isn’t Final: A Lesson in Recommitting to Goals

I’m not even sure what the last post was that I put on this blog.

I know that I had tried to commit to posting something every day for a year and that I failed at that.

So let us begin again. Let us begin anew.

Failure is never an event; it is only a lesson for the future.

For a long time in my door-to-door career, my home screen had on it a simple quote about failure: “Failure is the undeniable sign of progress towards a goal.”

It was a quote I got from the sales book Go for No, and I believe that it was the only reason for any sort of success I was able to achieve in that career.

So with that in mind, what are some of the failures I’ve seen that have led me to recommit to this blog and recommit to writing every day?

Breaking the Chains of Habit: The Root of All Progress

Dr. Johnson said that “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

And isn’t that the root of all the troubles in the world: consistency, routine, habit?

If you could stay on the diet, you’d look amazing.

If you could work out every day, you’d be strong.

If you could meditate, you’d be calm.

If you could give 100 percent all the time, you’d be promoted.

If only, if only—and on and on it goes.

We all know what we want to do and how we want to live, but there is that behavior that breaks us, brings us back to our present state, and that is habit.

I can see that writing every day at the same time was the first habit to be broken and thus led to the breakdown of writing and posting every day.

The time slowly slipped from the first thing in the morning, pushed to midday, and then the idea that I’d just write double the amount tomorrow.

And as we all know, it’s over from there.

Consistency is the one thing that moves the needle any time I’ve tried to improve in some phase of my life.

Related Posts:

• The Silent Killer of Success: How Small Choices Destroy Your Future
• The Brutal Truth About Losing Everything—And Why It’s Necessary
• “One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience”…
• The Road Not Taken: How Every Choice Shapes Your Future
• Failure is Crushing—But Here’s Why It’s Your Greatest Asset

The Seinfeld Strategy: How Consistency Builds Success

There’s that great story about Jerry Seinfeld when asked about how to become a great comedian, and he said to grab a wall calendar and every day that you sat down and wrote jokes, you’d put an X on that day.

After a few days, you’d have built up a streak of X’s forming a chain, and your only job now was to not break the chain.

Eventually, if you stay consistent with something, you start to understand it, to grasp it, to become familiar with it, and eventually, things click, and it becomes you.

Success could be boiled down to this thought.

There isn’t much more to it.

Get some outside help every once in a while to see the blind spots, but basically keep moving down that road, and eventually, things align.

But how do you sell help books if success is that simple?

And if it’s that simple, why are so many, in Thoreau’s words, “leading lives of quiet desperation?”

Because of habits and routines and the distractions in this thing called life, that road you’re walking down towards success becomes a hard road to stay on.

And the packaging around this simple idea of consistency is the author’s strategy to keep you walking on the road.

And it all works when you actively work it, but just like muscle, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

We don’t need more information; we just need to apply what we already have.

---

If this strikes a chord in you—the hunger to sharpen, to evolve—explore Poetics of Self-Mastery. It’s for those done with distraction, ready to confront the quiet disciplines that forge identity. No hacks. No hype. Just the art of becoming who you were meant to be.

Read Poetics of Self-Mastery (Why You’re Still Stuck)

---

The Distraction Trap: Why Focus Is the Ultimate Superpower

Coming in on a similar vein to this idea of habit and having a set time to write was this growing anxiety I’ve had that I haven’t been able to earn any money off of these sales pages that I put up. I kept thinking that I needed to focus on one thing first to get it off the ground, and then I could expand to multiple things.

My idea was that I’d find out how to make money off of these sales funnels, and then I’d come back and write the blog.

A weird thought, but at the time, it made sense, and I can still see the logic to it.

Get good at one thing first and then add another.

But it felt at the time that this blog was pushing out the sales funnels, and I wasn’t able to focus on that work.

I’ve still made no money on that front either, but I have definitely learned a lot about it.

I’m not sure why I can’t just use this blog to document my ideas and experience around building an online business, but at the time, that didn’t seem like something I should do.

A New Beginning: Embracing the Power of Starting Over

And so here we go again.

It is time to begin again, to begin anew.

So let us begin at the beginning.

---

Ready to burn your default thinking? Download Dangerous by Design. Discover the 10 books that fracture, interrupt, and rewire the creative mind. Get the guide & read dangerously.

---