Stop the Challenge!

The 21-day Challenge has taken an unexpected turn.

Yesterday I didn’t write a post, but that’s not the turn I’m talking about, so what is it?

When I first posted the challenge, I had already been doing it for 15 days and my initial objective was just to share my results with you guys.

While writing, I had the idea of challenging others to do the same.

I thought it could be helpful to some and ignored by others…

I was wrong!

A lot of people took on the challenge, but a lot felt like they were failing for not writing every day.

I felt guilty. This was not what I intended!

I tried to mitigate the damage by commenting on their posts, but I think in some cases I was still misunderstood.

The Purpose

The idea was that if we repeat an action every day for 21 days we create a habit, if we do it consciously, we can choose to create a healthy habit, one that will move us in the direction of our goals, to be a better person than we were. There’s always room for improvement.

My goal was to write a post every day for 21 days because I wanted to become a better writer, creating the habit of writing daily could help me achieve that goal.

But if I miss a day of those 21, do I become a worse writer? Of course not!

Did I still improve myself? Definitely!

So, the purpose of the 21-day challenge was not to never miss a day, that’s impossible!

Yeah maybe we can go 21 days without failing, but eventually we would miss one day, it happened to me yesterday as to many others…

What does it matter if I failed after or before 21 days? That’s not important, the objective was always to help us create a better version of ourselves.

Failing is in our nature

Our spirited Caleb wrote in his post today: “I will continue to fail. It is both my nature and my fate.”

He’s right, but it’s not just his nature and his fate, it is all of us’.

We are programmed to learn through failure, from birth.

How many times did you fall before you learned to walk?

What about after you learned to walk? Did you never fall again?

How many times did you fall before you learned to ride a bicycle?

What about after?

Think of all the things you’re good at, were you good the first thing you did it?

Was there anything you became good at without failing?

We were taught to fear failing, it’s not a natural fear!

I have two daughters, and with the youngest I’ve been paying attention to some details, like the ridiculous amount of times she falls… I even wrote a post about that, I estimated that she fell an average of 20 times per day, for over 3 months, now at a lower rate but keeps falling.

Another detail I noticed was the fact that she doesn’t fear anything until she has a reason to do so, i.e.: getting hurt.

Still, falling doesn’t discourage her from standing up.

Later, we go to school and we start to be punished for mistakes, praised for perfection, and all of this repeatedly until we are as close to robots as a human being can be…

This is not who we are, we learn through our mistakes not from other people telling us how it’s done!

So, this fear is not natural, it was been taught to us, and we need to get over it because as entrepreneurs we need to fail more than ever.

To be successful you only need to be right once!

Think about it, you can fail continuously for years, but the moment you are right you are successful.

It’s just a matter of semantics, the meaning we attribute to the word failure…

Back to my daughter walking, before she walked her first step, she stood up, then she tried gently to move her leg and fell, later she repeated the same process, and then again, until she successfully stepped forward without falling.

In that moment, she knew she could walk, it would take time and falling a lot more times, but she had done it, she only had to repeat it a bunch of times.

If you fail enough times to achieve the result you’re looking for, then you’ve proved to yourself that you can do it, you are already successful, you only needed to be right once, but you had to fail a lot of times.

I want to remove the burden of the challenge from everyone’s shoulders, including myself.

The Key is to never give up!

Wishing you all lots of success after your failures!