I'm setting myself a new challenge. To fail at least once every single day. I have no idea exactly how I'm going to achieve that yet but I will do my best to fail.

Failure is perhaps one of the most underrated things by society. Without failure there is no learning. As Thomas Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work". We must embrace failure. All the greatest people in history knew how important it is to fail.

A different way of framing failure is trying. If you never try anything new you'll never fail. But then you'll never be able to achieve anything beyond what you are currently capable of. What separates who we are today vs who we are in 20 years is how many failures we've accumulated. Each failure is a valuable lesson. We need to seek out more failures, not less.

So why have I set the challenge to fail every day?

To answer this you need to understand some basic math.

Growth is determined by starting base + (growth rate \* time).

Out of the three factors, there's only one you can control, your growth rate. And over a long period of time, this is the only thing that'll matter. As Einstein said, "compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe".

This is the core idea of Atomic Habits, to get 1% better each day and that'll accumulate into huge returns over time. What is neglected however, is that moving slightly faster results in disproportionate gains. If you took $100 and compounded it at 1% every day for a year you would get $3,778.34, but if you increase the rate slightly to just 1.1% a day, you would end up with $5,422.15. That's 44% more. To take it even further, if you had a rate of 2%, you would end up with $137,740.83. This is why it's important to accelerate.

Setting a goal of 1 failure each day is about significantly increasing my growth rate. I suspect that most people improve marginally in some area each day. However, to improve spectacularly each day, you must fail spectacularly each day.

I expect the biggest challenge with this is managing emotions. It is extremely hard to tolerate failure day after day, and if it becomes easy, then that means you're not failing hard enough.

If you'd like to fail with me, then let me know and if enough people are interested I can create a group chat.

Thanks for reading Meditations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I'm setting myself a new challenge. To fail at least once every single day. I have no idea exactly how I'm going to achieve that yet but I will do my best to fail.

Failure is perhaps one of the most underrated things by society. Without failure there is no learning. As Thomas Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work". We must embrace failure. All the greatest people in history knew how important it is to fail.

A different way of framing failure is trying. If you never try anything new you'll never fail. But then you'll never be able to achieve anything beyond what you are currently capable of. What separates who we are today vs who we are in 20 years is how many failures we've accumulated. Each failure is a valuable lesson. We need to seek out more failures, not less.

So why have I set the challenge to fail every day?

To answer this you need to understand some basic math.

Growth is determined by starting base + (growth rate \* time).

Out of the three factors, there's only one you can control, your growth rate. And over a long period of time, this is the only thing that'll matter. As Einstein said, "compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe".

This is the core idea of Atomic Habits, to get 1% better each day and that'll accumulate into huge returns over time. What is neglected however, is that moving slightly faster results in disproportionate gains. If you took $100 and compounded it at 1% every day for a year you would get $3,778.34, but if you increase the rate slightly to just 1.1% a day, you would end up with $5,422.15. That's 44% more. To take it even further, if you had a rate of 2%, you would end up with $137,740.83. This is why it's important to accelerate.

Setting a goal of 1 failure each day is about significantly increasing my growth rate. I suspect that most people improve marginally in some area each day. However, to improve spectacularly each day, you must fail spectacularly each day.

I expect the biggest challenge with this is managing emotions. It is extremely hard to tolerate failure day after day, and if it becomes easy, then that means you're not failing hard enough.

If you'd like to fail with me, then let me know and if enough people are interested I can create a group chat.

Thanks for reading Meditations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.