Failure — Fast-Track to Success
A virtual shortcut. No quick fix.
1-Minute Tip Sheet
Impossible? I’m possible. After failing successfully.
What we call failure is a familiar cause of stress. In truth, many “failures” are not failures. And none of them should cause undue stress. We don’t welcome failure, but they’re inevitable whenever you do anything worthwhile.
After failing many other lifestyle improvement programs, participants in my Healing Habits clinic program finally learned to embrace and even value failure. After that, they could master the secret of an ultimate shortcut to success, to be shared below.
A True Story
“Code Blue. Room 8, Coronary Care Unit. Code…” the overhead blared unrelentingly. Not two minutes later, a calmer voice announced, “Code Blue answered.”
The grateful family said to me, “Thank you so much, doc. Those minutes felt like an eternity to us. How long did that actually take you?”
“Ten years…and two seconds,” I answered.
Inside the unit, it wasn’t “as seen on TV”. The Code Team was all there instantly. Everyone was busy, not stressed. Orders were voiced and echoed, clearly, barely above a hush. After a final all-around check-in, the reviving electric pulse delivery took two seconds. And a life was saved.
It had taken all of the team many years of training. We had many dry runs, too many actual instances, and, yes, also many trials and errors along the way.
In dealing with life, nothing is 100%. So, we get as close to it as we can by learning from all our failures without fail. And since we’re also dealing with death, we openly share all our failures so that we always fast-track on one another’s learning curves.
Healing Habit, Not Keeling Habit
There is no other area in modern medicine I know of that has failed so dismally as our obesity epidemic. With tripling of the obesity rate since 1950, 2/3 of our population is now overweight. Beyond poundage, but because of it, diabetes and many severe medical ailments have gone up in parallel. Personal suffering is not even measured.
The 2000-some patients and coworkers in my lifestyle clinic had failed many other outfits outside. We learned from these outfits’ published mistakes. As a result, in our 25 years, over 90% of our enrollees completed the program with success, compared to under 50% in most commercial weight loss programs.
Our participants confirmed my hunch that didactics and dieting didn’t work, just like many other conventional wisdom “preachings”. They already had information galore in bookstores and online. They were sick of professionals telling them, “Don’t do that. Do this. Diet or die.”
They echoed with one another, “It’s not just what you’re eating but what’s eating you.” Also, they already knew what they should do but didn’t have the right ‘mindset reset’ to get themselves to do it consistently every day.
That’s why our collaborative coaching method worked. And in the process, we taught one another valuable life lessons as well. Let’s share the experience here.
Experience is just a fancy word for making mistakes.
Having the same experience a thousand times without learning anything is worthless. Worthy experience is recovering and learning from every mistake and not repeating it.
“Never make the same mistake twice.
Every mistake you make must be new and worse than the ones before.”Anonymous
Funny but true. If you keep making the same mistakes, then it’s like you haven’t made enough of them yet and need to keep repeating them until you finally learn. A keeling habit!
After so many failures elsewhere, our enrollees were ready for lifelong success, not temporary quick fixes. They also knew to expect setbacks along such a journey of a lifetime, and they got better and better after overcoming them. A healing habit!
A Virtual “Shortcut”
It’s a common belief that, “If I do this, I will get that, then I’ll be happy.”
Successful people often do the reverse. They are happy first, then it comes to them, and they “just do it”. They be, get, then do.
Having failed plenty but never fallen for long, they have little to worry or fear. With justified confidence, what they need all seem to be just there or within reach. How? Because, this time, they are ready. Then they do what feels natural and in sync.
Wellness works well this way, as well. Strenuous stress and strain from struggling would be, well, anti-wellness. A healing habit should be just that—healing.
So, here’s the ‘ultimate shortcut’ - Take your actions as if you have already succeeded.
Imagine saying, “Ugh! What’s happening to this body? Oh no, I shouldn’t eat that. Damn, I should start to exercise. Sh*!, I’m so stressed out. I’ll never make it. I’m such a loser.”
Imagine saying, instead, “I am a happy, healthy, resilient, and fit person. So, I don’t eat that for it wouldn’t serve me. What I just did, you call that exercise? No wonder I feel so much better now. This challenge I’m facing really gets me going. I know I’ll make it.”
You can pretty much predict the outcome in each case. No, “fake it ‘till you make it.” rarely works. Instead, you must have practiced ‘failing successfully’, perhaps more than once, and risen from the experience.
This shortcut is no quick fix. A winning mindset and attitude that you are ‘already there’ is a promissory note for success from your commitment to intentional action. It is a ‘knowing’ that you are destined for it. That’s why you do it without fail.
Even if you don’t make it this time, the valuable lessons from your failure can never be taken from you in your next attempt. This shortcut is open only to a journey paved with successful failures.
It is like an airlift to the mountaintop from a high plateau you’ve already reached on your own. All you have to do then is mentally wait up there at the peak until the rest of you and the world catch up shortly.
It is the 2-second lifesaving electric shock delivered above after 10 years of medical training.
1-Minute Tip Sheet
Fail, to Succeed
Failure is not a shortcut to a quick score.
It is a fast track to worthy long-term success.Every failure is already done and paid for,
Learn. Correct. Never let a mistake go to waste.Learning from your own failure sticks better.
Learning from others’ failures stings less.
Learn from them all so you can skip some classes.Fail fast. Fail big. Fail often.
Just not the same way twice.If you take one step backward after two steps forward,
you’re still advancing, and a-dancing and not a-quitting.Take your time to recover, yet not so long as to be left behind to the point of no return.
Only quitting a good thing before it’s time is failing for good.
Failure is not falling down.
Failure is not getting up.Many People
Bonus Podcast – Lightening It Up
Each 2-3 minutes
(1) Light Spectrum
(3) Light Speed
(4) Light Show
(5) Light Unseen
(7) The Lighter Side
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This eighth stand-alone post is of a series, Healing Habits, based on successful solutions of 2000 patients and coworkers in a lifestyle clinical program over 25 years. 2024
The images are curated from iStock with subscription.
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