Guy Reams (00:00.782)
This is day 43. The goal is failure. I bring this topic up because most my life I misunderstood the nature of goals. Somebody told me a long time ago that I needed to make sure that my goals were specific and measurable. And so I took that to heart. I also took another thing to heart, which is that you should set obtainable or achievable goals.
But as I got older in life, I realized that those two pieces of advice were completely wrong.
Goals, by their very nature, should be unobtainable. They should be unachievable, meaning that goals are literally the embodiment of the impossible. For some reason, us humans will strive to achieve the impossible, but we'll get bored with the probable. So consequently, goals should be very nebulous, inspiring,
and unachievable. And by so doing, we will want to achieve them. We will do everything we can to achieve the impossible. So most of my life, I thought I needed to set goals so that I could have success and achieve them. And that's okay to a certain point. The problem is that oftentimes I was setting the bar too low. I needed to set the bar much higher. So by setting the bar to be failure... So let me restate.
Success is what we consider to be the top of the mountain.
Guy Reams (01:45.079)
But that's not true. The top of the pyramid is failure. Because the only time you ever go to your fullest extent and put in your maximum effort is when you achieve failure. We think failure is lack of achievement, when in reality failure is evidence that you did your best. So success by its nature is the wrong target.
We should be reaching for failure. Failures that are so high that your misses are better than anyone else around you. Most successful people that I've met have in their particular moment in time when I met them were miserable with failure. They were struggling with things they were not doing well at. And I really was curious as to why they were struggling
when they seemed so successful to me. And when I talked to them, I realized that they were used to and constantly involved in the struggle. People that are the most successful have learned to accept failure as a regular part of life.
Guy Reams (03:04.993)
The issue with these people is what they consider to be an absolute failure, we look at as miraculous success, which is really interesting to me. So really, you should set your target to be, I'm gonna fail so spectacularly that everybody around me will consider it to be an enormous success. Pushing to failure means a whole new state of mind.
When you start out each day and failure becomes your goal, you are going to push yourself as hard as possible to get to the point of failure.
A perfect example of why this principle works is in the world of weight training or any sort of training, physical training. The only time you're ever able to really gain success is when you push your muscles or your training regime to failure. If I were to start running, if I were to run in my running program, if I were not to run to failure, then I would not grow.
I would just stabilize flat line and I would stabilize and plateau. In weight training, the goal is to work the muscles to the point of failure and then the muscles can rebuild and grow. This is true in all organic systems. Every organic system that I have studied in my life has always found growth through failure. This is the time of year when I asked my gardener to trim to
cut down all of my rose bushes. The rose bushes need to be trimmed to the almost down to the ground almost, leaving very little left of what was there before. But in the springtime when those rose bushes come back, they will have harnessed energy from the soil and they will bloom spectacularly next spring. So rose bushes are an example of
Guy Reams (05:08.801)
failure being the ultimate growth engine.
Guy Reams (05:15.189)
You can look at people's lives and it seems like, and I don't know if this is true with you, but it is with me. The greatest successes I've had in my life have come after incredible failure. It's just amazing how that works. I believe this is because resilience is built only after failure, after repeated failure. You cannot be resilient unless you've pushed yourself to failure. Resilience is not something you can learn.
Resilience is earned and it has earned one failure after another repeatedly. So, in essence, we must push to failure wherever we can. So our goal should not be to finally get to the point of success, but rather pushing ourselves so hard that we fail and then the next day we pick up and try again.
This is how growth occurs in organic systems. And this is how growth occurs in our lives as well as in our endeavors. So this is to change in our mindset. Seek to fail. Don't seek to obtain.