I have written in the past on this blog that failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing, that it can be beneficial to you as a learning experience. Even with that being true it is still something that must be ultimately overcome to reach our defined goal and be able to say we successfully accomplished it. But what are the root causes of failure? Why do some plans work while others flop? Why are some people good at accomplishing what they want while others crash and burn each and every time? Avoiding the most prevalent causes of failure allows for your chances of success to skyrocket. Now the following five causes of failure are by no means the only suspects for something to go wrong but they all usually play some role in the demise of our goals.

1. Fear of Past Failures

The past always has a profound effect psychologically on your present and future whether your experiences have been positive or negative. Letting a negative experience, in this case a failure, linger in your mind will work against you to sabotage accomplishing your new goals. This is where learning from your mistakes can be a very helpful thing as long as you don’t dwell on what went wrong and what you would go back and do differently. You must accept the fact that the past is the past and it can not inhibit you from taking the necessary steps to get what you want out of your life or your business. Fear can make you second guess your plans and even your ability to get those plans done and that second guessing isn’t the productive kind you need to be more efficient

2. Not Having a Clear Goal

Sometimes when you start on your journey you haven’t specified what it is exactly you want to do. You may wake up one morning with a positive attitude and the ambition to change your life and maybe do some things temporarily that do improve how you live. But unless you focus on a specific goal that you would like to accomplish the chance that you will fail is very large. Instead of saying I want to change my life say I want to change my social life for the better. Then go even more specific, I want more friends or I want to successfully set up this many dates within a certain time frame. Not having a clear goal is almost as detrimental as not having a goal at all in that neither one is going to take you where you want to ultimately be. Also, it is important to really reflect on things and decide if you have chosen the right goal. You could be expending lots of your precious time and energy into pursuing something that won’t help you or that you really don’t have a true passion for.

3. Blame Game

Failure leads to frustration which leads to short tempers and someone to point the finger at as the reason why you didn’t succeed. By trying to pin the blame on someone else you’re avoiding looking deeper into the real reasons you failed which probably had more to do with poor planning and/or execution. You need to condition yourself to act like a leader in that you should accept responsibility for what went wrong and be able to praise others for the help they have give you. This doesn’t mean that you should blame yourself totally and wallow in your own self pity. No, you need to realize your faults and mistakes and improve upon them, this helps to stamp out the first cause of reliving past mistakes.

4. Expecting Positive Returns with Short Cuts

Rarely is the easy way going to be the road you should take. If it were we would all be living or dream lives and working our dream jobs. You have to be willing to make a choice of going after what you want and giving up what is comfortable for you to do. Once you have decided to make a run at your goal you have to stick with it no matter how difficult it may be and not cut corners. If you see a better way to do something then of course you would try to implement it and make things happen quicker but you won’t get anything of value by doing a half-assed job. Maximize your time and try to get as much done as possible without busying yourself with things that won’t matter in the long run.

5. Quitting Too Early

Quitting to early can apply to two situations, the first is where you give up before you accomplish your goal and the second is when you get comfortable with your successes. Obviously if you quit before you’re done you are going to experience failure but the roots of you quitting stem due more to frustrations than any real barricade that cannot be overcome. Starting a goal is always the easy part, it’s the middle where things go awry and doubts about whether you can actually do it start to creep in. It can be extremely difficult to maintain your focus over long periods of time and we all get burned out. It is during these dark moments of despair that you must reevaluate. Step back from everything and take a look at what you’re doing wrong and what could be done without putting as much energy into it. Think of it as running a marathon, if you try sprint the only result will be complete failure to do the full 26.2 miles. Slow things down and focus on accomplishing smaller parts of a larger goal and let them all add up for you. When you do this you mustn’t get caught up in your own victories and believe that you can either cruise to the top or your work is done entirely. Changes to your life are never done and that’s what makes it all so exciting there is always something for you to work on to make you happy, healthier, and an overall better you.

This afternoon I went to the library at my university for a bit of research on movie making and screenwriting to help continue my development of a screenplay. The library features 10 full floors of books and even though the film section is relegated to a single row on a single floor it still features more material than I could reasonably read even with years at my disposal. When I thought about this fact while making my way from shelf to shelf I realized that while I read every single day I probably have only read 20-30 entire books so far this year. It dawned on me that most of my information comes through articles and reading the parts of books that interest me and that actually may be a good thing.

Today for instance I pulled books off of the shelf on Woody Allen films,a book on Ridley Scott's films, a book of essays on Blade Runner, and three separate books on writing and selling screenplays. Now unless I had mounds of time that I wanted to dedicate to reading these books let's say it could take a month or so of my life to sit down and read each page. Sure it would be an accomplishment of sorts but would the time invested be worth it? No. I knew exactly what I wanted to read about going into the day, developing a screenplay. So as a result upon opening each books I scanned the table of contents to pick out the sections that would be most beneficial for me. I read about the characters and their relationships in Manhattan, I read about interpretations of Blade Runner and the production of that Los Angeles cityscape , and then I focused specifically on writing scenes and took notes from each of the three books on their specific advice.

In three hours I managed to gather all the information I wanted today and read some nice tid bits about two movies I enjoy that made me feel creative. Now I'm not saying that I want to start doing this with every single book I pick up but let's face it many books especially non-fiction that don't require you to follow in a linear fashion because up to half of it can be fluff. When I looked through these books on screenplays entire chapters were devoted to why would you want to write one? This may be well and good if you lack motivation to do something but I'm in a library on a day I could have done anything I wanted but instead I wanted to learn further about crafting scenes, I think I can safely skip those types of chapters.

It's just like the textbooks you buy for a class have any of your professors covered every chapter that's in those mammoth back breakers? None of mine have but did it stop you from feeling like you didn't learn? Would you have learned more if the professor tried to squeeze 50-60 chapters into 4 months of the semester? No you have to be efficient with your learning and break things down into further sections just like you have separate classes for a major. If i were to sit down and read one giant book that covered every topic of screenwriting I highly doubt that I could write a better script than if I had taken the same time and read only about creating scenes from several sources. The first option would give me shallow understanding of everything instead of a great deal of knowledge in one area and the movie maybe crap and other areas but it might have enough memorable scenes to carry it to decency.

I still want to read complete books every month and I'm doing so especially with classics on audio book which just listening to at the gym could net me and extra 5-10 per month but I also need to ramp up my intensity for going after specific knowledge in books. I need to stop feeling like it was somehow a failure that I checked out a book and didn't finish the whole thing and cut through the fluff. It's like I mentioned in this post: Become World Class at Something about utilizing short bursts of intense focus on one aspect of a subject and becoming great at one thing instead of trying to learn a whole broad topic at once and I think I may have just found it's application in crafting a screenplay. I'll have to think on this some more and I'll let you know in future posts what my course of action will be. Keep reading.

I've been thinking a lot today about failure and how much power we sometimes let it have in determining our lives. I always liked that Michael Jordan quote about being able to accept failure but not being able to accept not trying and the more I thought about it the more I realized that basketball was a perfect example of it in my life as well. A star perimeter player in the NBA will hit around 50% of his shots that means he will fail half of the time he tries to make a shot. You might say well those are small failures and you would be correct but all of those small failures add up to great success. Even though a basketball player spends hours of his life practicing shooting he knows that even though he will miss shots he must keep shooting because of the confidence he has developed over the years.

I look at my own experiences with basketball and see plenty of defeats and failures to execute but it never erased my love of the game for they were all only temporary set backs. I could have stopped playing at the age of six when my shots weren't falling the way I wanted them, I could have stopped playing when I was cut from teams, I could have stopped trying to dunk (haha I'm still working on this)but none of this ever made me quit or make me any less passionate.

We only seem to remember our major letdowns and forget all the little battles we lost at first like learning to tie our shoes or ride a bike because those have become habits that are ingrained in our minds. I think the key is to try and never let one failure effect you more than another no matter how much you worked towards that goal. Obviously some will push us to our psychological breaking point and that's fine you're going to get knocked down sometimes but are you going to let one thing keep beating you down repeatedly?

That's one of the great things about being human, our ability to learn and overcome what we once thought were our limits. How many times did people fail before the 4 minute mile 'barrier' was broken? Well, every documented runner up to that point. Failure is not meant to be a deterrent but rather a learning experience, something that you analyze and try to figure out with the same vigor as your first attempt. You're always going to make mistakes there just isn't any point in letting it depress you.

So take this to heart when you're trying to accomplish your current goals or goals that are still on the horizon: Every success is made up of smaller failures. Maybe you're are trying to lose weight and it isn't working as well as you had planned. Does that mean you should just stop and revert back to your old unhealthy lifestyle? No, it only means that you must adapt to a new exercise and/or diet plan to get six pack abs. To get to where you want to go in life involves accepting that you will always experience more failure than you do moments of triumph.