Years ago, I went to a startup event in Bengaluru, it was a workshop and post that they had 3 speakers, all of them successful and one of them is gray and white-haired and has a funny name that I can’t recollect now. Someone from the crowd asked him, what makes people successful. The speaker said, “in my experience of working with people if you stay long enough towards your goal, you will win”.
It is a law of large numbers. If you toss a coin enough times, you will have a fair chance of making the ratio of heads and tails showing up close to 1:1 while if you make only 10 attempts the probability is very low.
Micheal Jordan has a large failure
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Paul Graham, Co-founder of Y-combinator which crossed its the market value of $100 Billion last year with alumni like Airbnb, Reddit, Coinbase, etc. In one of his article he writes
“One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. “
You get mastery by learning from your mistakes and learning from it frequently. Anders Ericsson, in his book ‘PEAK’ writes about how to achieve mastery on anything -> Be clear about what you want to achieve(specific goal), Focus just on it, have constant feedback on what’s working and what’s failing and push your comfort zone.
Sometimes everything will look worse and you could constantly fail but as Mark Mansion, the author of ‘The Subtle art of not giving a f*ck’ says “ Guts brings Glory”. Great people become great because they handle more failures than others ever could. Failures are essential to succeed, embrace them.
Conclusion:
Stay long enough
Make large attempts to reach your goal
Have constant learning from failures
No guts, No glory.
Embrace Failures