- Hey, everyone, it's Frank.
Today, we're gonna be talking about failure.
Congratulations, you've failed.
And how to get through failure,
whether it's failure of a relationship,
business, you got fired from your job,
you let someone down, the kind of thing
where you look at yourself and you're like,
how far have I fallen?
You're probably experiencing feelings of shame, regret.
You're looping on a bunch of thoughts
about what you could've done differently,
and maybe you're thinking to yourself,
how unfair this is that I'm going through it
while so many other people don't seem to deal
with these failures.
But the point that I wanna get across to you
is that failure is a blessing.
Failure is a good thing,
even as right now you might be saying,
this is the worst I've ever felt.
How can this be good?
I'm here to tell you that it is,
because a lot of this pain that's happening
when you fail comes from the ego being hurt.
Now, the ego isn't all bad.
When I say ego, I just mean our self-concept,
how we see ourselves in the world.
The ego is necessary in order to just exist in reality.
So, I'm not saying it's a bad thing,
but the ego gets in the way
from growth and from sometimes just being happy.
Because when you fail, the ego is taking a big hit.
Your self-concept is taking a big hit,
because you were going along at a status quo
of I'm in this relationship.
I am in this job,
and then the worst thing that could happen, happened,
and that pillar of your reality got knocked out.
And suddenly, you have to look at yourself,
and your self-concept no longer includes,
oh, I am part of this thing,
because I have failed at it.
It's not that it just naturally ended,
but it was interrupted.
It unnaturally ceased because of a failure on my part,
and that reflects poorly on me.
A lot of the pain that's coming from a failure has to do
with the ego starting to die away
in some portion, the portion that was connected
with the thing that failed.
Well, the mistake that a lot of people make
is to feel that pain and to say, this is wrong,
I shouldn't be feeling this way.
And maybe they deflect the failure onto someone else.
They find a convenient excuse for why the failure happened.
They're trying to find a way to patch up that self-concept
and be like, oh well, even though this thing failed
in my life, it wasn't my fault and I can just move along.
I just need to get myself back to where I was,
and then we'll be back to normal.
We'll be back to what I was before.
And maybe the failure
that you've experienced is really not your fault.
Maybe your relationship ended,
because the other person just decided to leave you.
It had nothing to do with you, or so you think.
Or, especially when it comes to losing a job,
sometimes companies just lay off people
because of budgetary constraints.
It wasn't really something you did.
So in those circumstances, it's easy to say,
man, I am just a victim of life.
I had nothing to do with it.
The problem is, even if that's true,
even if you didn't have much to do with it,
when you hit that low of a failure
and all you're trying to do is find ways around it,
when you get back to the status quo
that you were before, and eventually you'll get back to it.
Well, maybe.
Eventually, when you get back to some stability,
you're setting yourself up to hit that low all over again,
if something else happens.
Hopefully it won't, but life can be chaotic.
You never know what's gonna happen.
So, when we have failures that have cut us down,
and maybe you're even at rock bottom,
maybe you're in a situation where my business failed.
I don't know how I'm gonna make rent next month.
These are very serious problems,
and of course, the scope of this video is not
to give you practical tips
on rectifying these concrete things in your life,
but it's more on the inner repairs that need to be made.
So, why do I say that failure is like a blessing?
Because, when the ego gets cut down
and part of it is dying,
rather than trying to just resuscitate this part
of your self-concept that has been hurt by the failure,
what I'm gonna suggest to you is to just let it die.
Let your self-concept reform in a way
where you don't need that thing that was hurt.
What it is, is a lot of us hold a lot
of unconscious reverence for our self-concept,
and we're like, no, this is me.
I gotta hold on to this.
I can't let this get messed up, you know.
But to truly grow and to move through and beyond a failure
and to not just get back up to where you were,
which is ultimately setting yourself up
to fall right back down again.
You have to let a part of yourself,
that part of yourself that was destroyed by the failure,
just let it go.
Let it die.
It's very painful.
I'm not saying that this is like, oh, I'm so happy now
that this has died.
No, it's gonna be very painful.
But I can tell you that human beings are very adaptable.
And eventually, if you can go through the pain
and let that part of yourself go,
rather than just trying to desperately save it,
trying to deflect the responsibility
for what happened to other people or other circumstances,
to say to yourself, no,
I actually had some part in this.
Now, it's a little dangerous what I'm saying, isn't it?
Because even if you didn't have a part to do,
even if you didn't play a part
in the actual events that led up to the failure,
you do play a part in the part of yourself
that has now been cut down.
And so, now you need to take responsibility
for putting yourself back together in a way
where you can incorporate this failure
and move on and still be a whole person,
rather than just trying to patch up that old part of you.
Because in a way, if you try to go back to the status quo,
part of you will be a lie in some sense,
and you will have a lot of insecurity
surrounding that area.
It takes a lot of courage and a lot of humility
to incorporate the failure,
to let part of your self-concept go
and then to be replaced with something much stronger.
In some ways, a failure can be the best thing
that could ever happen to you, if you go through it,
because once you come out on the other side,
you can look back and you can say,
wow, I went through that low point.
I hit that rock bottom, and I got out of it.
And I did it.
I took responsibility for getting myself out of it,
and I wasn't just trying to climb my way back up
to where I was.
I'm trying to move forward and be like,
nothing can really be the same about me
and about my concept of myself in the world after this.
This doesn't mean going forward being bitter.
It's really about trying to free yourself.
I think in some ways, you will be more bitter
and more damaged by the failure, if you try to go backwards,
if you try to shy away from the bad feelings,
if you try to get back to the status quo before the failure.
What you need to do is go straight into it,
into the darkness of what does this failure mean about me?
What does it mean about the world
and how I saw everything about it?
'Cause we have so many illusions
that we don't even realize,
and then when we go through something
that fundamentally changes our reality,
that is extremely painful.
When reality totally changes,
that is very difficult to handle in the short term.
And our tendency is to wanna block it
and say, no, this thing is just an anomaly,
and my way of seeing the world and myself is correct,
has always been correct
and this other thing doesn't quite fit,
and I'm just gonna repress it, suppress it.
And maybe you'll get back to a place
where you're like, oh, I'm happy again.
But that thing, you still know that thing is there,
that thing that has contradicted your view of reality.
And so, in a way you've seen beyond it,
and then you know that the status quo you've returned to,
the way things were before the failure is a lie.
That's why you need to incorporate it.
You need to say, okay, my view of reality was,
it had some illusions going on.
Now, I need to incorporate that into my view of reality,
and that is gonna mean that other parts of me,
how I viewed myself in the world have to go away.
It's painful.
You should be feeling some pain.
I'm not gonna be one of the people who's gonna tell you,
if you feel bad, if something bad happened in your life
and you feel bad, just feel good, just feel positive.
That is not a healthy way of going about things.
It's not a healthy way to stay in the darkness,
but the only way to get
to full recovery,
to fully move beyond a failure
is to go through it,
through to the other side to a new world,
to a new reality, a new self-concept.
And hopefully, I mean, in a way you can start
to embrace failure and be like, oh, this is great.
I'm going through darkness over and over.
This is fantastic.
Hopefully it's a different darkness every time,
'cause if you're going through the same failures
over and over, it's a sign that you're not incorporating it.
You're going back to the status quo before.
You're gonna find that if you just go through the pain,
go through the failure, let parts of yourself die,
so that you can embrace new views of reality,
you're gonna find on the other side,
whoa, I feel so much lighter and more free now.
And my way of looking at life is that the ultimate thing,
the ultimate goal for humans is to find freedom.
That's why so many people turn to self help,
spirituality, religion.
It's why so many people go the other way
and turn to alcohol, drugs, things to numb themselves,
because they wanna be free.
Of what?
What do you wanna be free of?
You wanna be free of those illusions
that you have of reality, including illusions of yourself.
Even if your ego wants to hold on to them,
your deep inner self wants to let go of that.
And once you've been through a failure,
you've seen it.
You've seen the truth, and a lot of people,
they see it and they block it out,
and they just go back to how it was before.
Do you see the problem with that?
It's not giving yourself the freedom to move through it
and be like, oh well, I've been through hell,
and I made it through, rather than going through hell
and then being like, well I went through that
and then I saved myself from it,
and now I'm afraid of it happening again,
because I know that the things that caused it to happen
and my views of the world are still based in illusion.
Right now, it might be very dark for you,
and there might be very practical things,
depending on what kind of failure you went through,
where you don't see the light at the end of the tunnel,
and I feel for you.
I'm not here to say that everything is easy
or that you'll be happy tomorrow.
But my encouragement is that if you go through it
and allow your views of yourself in the world to be changed
and not in a bitter way, but just be like,
oh, I am now released of the illusions.
I can now live in a more free way.
When you come out on the other side,
you will have incorporated this failure
in such a way, where it will make you stronger
than ever before and more free
and able to move towards what you really want in life,
whatever that is, your specific goals.
It may not be fast.
It may not be as fast as you want it to be,
but don't try to recover
and go back to the way it was before, move forward.
Allow yourself to let go of the reverence you have
for your own self-concept.
Don't be afraid, I mean, it's scary.
I can't tell you to not be afraid.
If you're afraid, you're afraid.
But move past the fear
and let parts of yourself just die off and go away
and come out on the other side realizing,
oh, eventually you'll come out on the other side
and realize, oh, why was I so freaked out
about letting this part of myself go?
Because it's only painful during the process
of letting it go.
Afterwards, you're like, oh, I'm fine. (laughs)
Somehow my self-concept managed
to incorporate the failure and heal.
So, whether it's a relationship, business,
interpersonal relationships with friends and family,
whatever the failure is, no matter how severe it is,
I wanna encourage you
that no matter how dark it is now,
if you just move through the darkness
and allow yourself to accept it,
just open your arms to it, on the other side of it,
you're gonna be much stronger,
and you'll look back on the failure
and be like, that was one of the best things
that ever happened to me.
Thank you for watching.
I appreciate it.
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if you wanna check those out.
Thanks so much for watching.
And as always, until next time,
stay cool and attractive.