Is It Failure or An Experiment?

This may come as a surprise, but we can not predict the future.  However, this reality shouldn’t dissuade us from thinking about our future in specific terms of what we would like that future to look like.  The right kinds of goals give us context for our daily decisions (intentionality).  The right kinds of goals force us to examine our stories about life and challenge us to update our beliefs.  The right kinds of goals create a process of character refinement and this process is more important than the goals themselves:

Personal Ownership Principle #3:  Maintain A Vision

“The process is more important than the products…

I define a ‘vision’ as a set of long term goals an individual has for the future.  A vision is characterized by being bold, realistic, and holistic.  A bold vision forces one to examine themselves regularly.  A realistic vision explores the risks associated with pursuing our goals. A holistic vision tries to account for the totality of life.  These 3 characteristics produce a process of personal refinement and self-direction that I believe is more important than achieving the goals themselves.”

Pg. 155, Adapt and Overcome by Travis Daigle

How Do You Refocus After Failure?

As I talked about in the last post, I thought I had my dream job back in 2018. It ended up being one of the biggest disappointments of my life. If you had asked me at the time, I would have told you that I had aspirations of saving more money and having a greater impact with my business/career. In the job that I described in the last post I most definitely made more money than I had seen since leaving the Army 6 years prior. Also, I was working with high school students so the opportunity to have an impact was definitely there. It didn’t work out. I had been building a business as a motivational speaker and that was floundering at best. When I left the military I knew I wanted to be my own boss but as of today (11 years and many attempts later) I have not come close.

The temptation is to drift into self-loathing and think of myself as a failure. This is where I tend to break stride with other people. I set a goal but I don’t get married to it. Remember, we can’t predict the future. You don’t know how a job is going to go until you get in there and start working. You certainly don’t know how a business is going to go until you start getting out there with your product or service. For me, goal setting is about giving myself aim, purpose, and direction. It’s about intentionally becoming the person I want to be. The key is having an open mind, working hard to be honest with ourselves, and looking at ‘failure’ more like a completed experiment.

If you are a scientist getting ready to run an experiment, you probably start with certain premises based on knowledge and experience (a story). Maybe you’re a biologist with a specialty in bacterial infections that attack the human nervous system. Maybe you have a theory about a course of treatment that would counteract a certain bacteria (your goal being to find a sustainable course of treatment). You start with your hypothesis (or how you think you might reach the goal) and then you run your experiment. You review results to understand if you were able to hit your goal. You update the hypothesis based on what you learn. You may even abandon the original goal altogether if you find out that an underlying premise (story) was wrong or you realize that your desire to continue moving forward has completely waned (it’s no longer worth fighting for). You don’t fail an experiment. You simply observe the results and update your understanding moving forward.

Coming back to where I was in 2018, my personal finance and dietary goals were part of a whole set of goals that I had for my life at the time.  Let me explain with 4 separate categories (I call these categories the Four Fundamental Areas of Life and this is how we create targets for goal setting):

Health – I was pursuing general strength measured through certain exercises. At that time I was experimenting with a vegan diet. I was really struggling to keep processed sugar out of my diet.

Personal Finances – Generally, I was trying to save money to have a 5-6 month emergency fund and start investing into my Roth IRA.  This meant budgeting regularly.  The challenge was I needed more income.  Making as little as $6,000 some years meant my savings was always dwindling down.

Relationships – When I think about relationship goals I think in terms of what I can control (my behavior).  I tend to think a lot about my frequency of communication, my level of honesty while also being empathetic, and self advocacy.  At this time I can remember working on self advocacy specifically (I’m still focused on this).

Work – My goal with work at the time was still to build a business as a speaker.  The job working with students allowed me to use my skills as a speaker and coach, so I thought it was a good fit.  As I explained before, things didn’t work out and the disappointment from this caused me to go into a depression for a period of time.

In the book I talk about a vision having three characteristics:  Realistic, Bold, and Holistic.

Realistic – When I talk about being realistic I mean thinking about risks.  What are the potential downsides of pursuing the courses of action related to your goals?  

When I left the military I was well aware of the fact that the businesses I would attempt to start may not work out in the long run.  I also acknowledged that the time I was spending not making money meant that I wasn’t saving for the future.  I also didn’t have health insurance.  This meant making sure I kept my health as a priority.  Exercising and doing my best to eat right were always important even though I often fell short with diet.  Having no health insurance and not heavily investing into social security and/or a 401k through an employer means that my physical health is largely in my own hands.  Staying physically healthy well into old age is important for many reasons but as someone who was self employed and earning little money for retirement I know that working at least part time until the day I die is a reality.  I want to be ready.

I did the best I could to confront all the risks associated with what I was doing in 2018 and I tried to mitigate them as best as possible.  Like I’ve said I’ve tried to start viable service businesses as a personal trainer, life coach, and speaker for the last 11 years.  Nothing has panned out and it’s disappointing every time.  What helps me emerge from the fog of disappointment and iterate is in part acknowledging the risks that things may not work out ahead of time.  I think this period in 2018 would have been much more devastating had I only thought of the possibility of success.

Bold –  Bold means setting challenging goals.  Goals that stretch you in some way.  What challenging is, is relative to you as an individual.  Self-Advocacy with others sounds simple but can be one of the most challenging things any one of us does.  It’s been a huge challenge for me most of my life.

Recently, I have again put down speaking as a business and some of you may have noticed that I no longer post videos to YouTube.  Why?  I have hated social media from the beginning of this journey.  An unfortunate error I have been making for the past 11 years is listening to other people tell me I need to be on social media in order to have success.  Everytime I try to utilize social media for my message it contributes to burnout.  The advice I have often heard from others is that in order to make any real headway with spreading my message, I must use social media.  It makes sense because  most people are using one social platform or another, but deep down I have never believed it was a necessity.  I’ve also known that it tends to affect me in a negative way, usually causing anxiety.  It doesn’t work for me and though people are well intentioned with advising me to use some social media platform (to include my wife), I’m done!  I have to be confident enough in myself to trust my own instincts/experiences and advocate for my own strategy.

In continuing to learn how to advocate for myself when confronted with ideas I disagree with, I’m learning things about my level of self confidence and faulty stories that I’m still carrying from childhood.  This is the value of a difficult goal.  It gives the opportunity for knowledge of self.  I’ll share more about what I’ve learned about myself later in the post but for now understand that knowing yourself better allows you to choose a more wise and conducive course of action in terms of reaching goals.

Holistic – Thinking about life as a whole reminds us that there is more to life than the part of your vision that may not be working out at the moment.  My business wasn’t working and the job I picked up didn’t work out but my health is still important, my friends and family obviously are still important, and I still have to pay bills.  This is when I found a security job in March of 2019.  This is also when I started writing again.  I had gotten so focused on speaking that I had stopped writing regularly.  In this whole process I’ve learned that writing is something that I’m always drawn to and something that I should always push myself to keep doing no matter what happens (very important takeaway from the last 5 years).  If my whole life was about the success of a job or business… Or for a parent, if their whole life was about their child’s success… Or if a person’s whole life was about saving money at the expense of any enjoyment… If it doesn’t work out, things can get pretty dark.  A holistic vision helps us remember all the important pieces of life as we fall short of our hopes from time to time.  This is the reason I created those 4 Fundamental Categories of Life from earlier.  In my opinion, these are the parts of life that will be essential for us to deal with throughout our lifetime:  health, personal finance, relationships, and work.  

Every time I set goals and reach a point of failure or I recognize misalignment with a goal, I stop, try to figure out what I’ve learned from that experiment, update my stories/goals, and move forward.  

Don’t focus on failing! Focus on What You’re Learning!

Set Goals by Focusing on What you can Control

My instincts… My deep gut feeling… My intuition tells me that you are better off having goals than not.  The challenge is focusing on the process and not obsessing over the outcome (the goal).    

So what had the process of chasing my own business taught me up until this point:

• I love thinking about how we improve ourselves and I’m a good writer.  From here on out I am committed to writing no matter what happens. 
• I’m not good at marketing or selling anything.  I am not only not good at either, but I would say I hate both.  
• I have been received incredibly well every time I give a public speech but on the whole I have found speaking with no money attached to it to be far more enjoyable.
• Discipline with my health and finances has helped me continue to experiment.
• The people around you make a huge difference in your energy level when you’re trying to create a business.  People who loved me could be very pessimistic towards my business and life in general.  This was incredibly draining.

When the pandemic started I had some momentum in my speaking business.  I wasn’t earning enough money to support myself but I had a few events scheduled that might have gained me significant notoriety and visibility.  However, at the same time this momentum was building, I was starting to burnout on the whole thing.  I wasn’t sure why I was burning out.  I would think, “I have major gigs scheduled, isn’t this what I’ve been working towards?”  Eventually I got word that all of my events were canceled.  I felt a huge sense of relief.  I’m still not sure why.  But I’ve learned to keep doing what works.  My writing has always been a source of joy for myself and seems to be interesting to others.  That habit has produced a book which lays out a fundamental philosophy for self improvement.  I’ve given lots of speeches but never had a core framework to share.  If I were to start speaking again, at least I can give people specific tools now.

This brings me to another point.  For me, setting goals can mean a specific objective but it also means accumulating a certain behavior over time.  This has a lot to do with focusing on those things that I can control.  Let me explain:

With exercise I can control much of what I do.  Therefore to look in the future and say, “5 years from now I want to be able to do a handstand for 1 minute straight.”, is challenging but totally reasonable and can be broken down into daily habits.

On the other hand, my financial success as a writer is very much dependent on how other people receive my writing.  I personally have learned that saying, “5 years from now I want to be a New York Times bestselling author.”, isn’t helpful.  It is bold but there’s so much that’s out of my control.  What I can say is, “5 years from now I want to have produced 100 blog posts, each on specific topics related to self improvement.”  This is well within my control and I can focus on other behaviors to help promote the writing (encouraging sharing, speaking to small groups, continuing to promote my book, etc.).  I’m more comfortable letting any other outcomes be results of this long term behavior.  Basically, goals need to be things that can be broken down into daily habits within our control.  

Reflection 

We’ve been reflecting on a habit that got better during the pandemic and one that got worse.  I’ve shared in the previous two posts how my dietary habits got worse and my personal savings habits got better.  I’ve also panned out and shown you those habits in the broader context of my entire life because these habits don’t exist in isolation.

Think about the 4 fundamental areas of life for yourself (health, personal finance, relationships, work).  What other parts of life impacted habits that got worse during the pandemic and habits that got better?  How are these things connected?

Based on what you’ve learned in the last 3 posts, create a vision for the future 3-5 years from now.  Use those 4 areas as a framework and remember the goals must be broken down into daily/weekly habits so focus on what you control. 

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