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.

Complacency can be the murderer of success. When we get into a comfortable position in life we tend to stop working, stop growing, and just not have the hunger we once did. Unfortunately for us the world around us doesn't stop changing and while we are standing still it is moving forward. We keep doing the same things that once worked well for us hoping to replicate earlier success and it doesn't work anymore because we failed to adapt all of life's little changes. This isn't to say that persistence and consistency aren't keys to success in life they are but when you allow your growth to be a rigid dogma of ideas you stop growing. How do we avoid this complacency and experience a lifetime of being on top of our game instead of just a few good years? By opening ourselves up to new ideas.

Any given year you can find a musician that has a great run of success and then won't ever be heard in a meaningful way ever again. It may be because they got lucky with a hit song and not really have much talent but there are plenty of others who are damn good musicians that fail to maintain their stardom mostly because they fail to adapt to changing tastes. It's like the disco craze, how many artists' careers did that claim? You see when you have success in one field or method you tend to get associated with that and that may be fine for awhile but it isn't very good for growth. This boxing yourself in forces you into stagnation and makes your life very predictable and without challenges.

The thing is that our educational system usually does the job for us by program specialization. Too many people choose a major and then ride it out for their entire careers without making a change even when they are experiencing diminishing returns. About a year ago before I had any concrete idea of how I was going to get to where I wanted to go I went to my student advisory meeting to see what kind of schedule I could put together. I hadn't declared a major yet and when the councilor asked me what I was looking into I said History and Biology. You would have thought that I had told a joke because he actually kind of laughed at the idea. Sure the two subjects aren't very similar and it would have required lots of work on my part but the idea of pairing two distant things was comical to him. To me the idea was just a way of exploring different concepts and finding a way to weave them together like I had read about with Benjamin Franklin, Cicero, da Vinci,Goethe, etc. These men weren't great because they narrowed their field of study but precisely because they never stopped expanding it.

Each new thing that you try can keep pushing you into a new direction and open up further doors for you. You let your ideas become fluid and less tightly controlled. Of course you must maintain some semblance of control and focus to master the new ideas but new methods and ideas shouldn't threaten you they should excite you. If you've ever watched what passes for political discussion in this country you know exactly what I mean, the other side has no good ideas and everybody is too stubborn to be proven wrong or think in another way. It's no wonder that nothing really ever gets done and the things that do are often watered down and ineffective. Without experimentation it becomes very difficult to solve problems and chokes any type of growth you may have experienced, remember Success is Made Out of Lots of Failure.

Experimentation and learning moves us forward and allows for us to adapt to a changing world. By casting your net wide you never allow for complacency to set in because as soon as you meet your goal in one area you are immediately drawn to something else that you're passionate about, hence you never rest on your laurels. You could say that you would never be the best at anything if you spread out your interests and that very well may be true but the king of the mountain can only go down or stay on top. If you knowledge or skill set is very specialized and you're the best at it what happens to your growth? You must now spend all of your time defending your spot at the top and in the process may very well become obsolete due to changing times. The security you feel in your position is in all likelihood just an illusion and if you aren't prepared for a rapid change you can often just get left in the cold. Think about all of the people who spent years working one job and becoming damn good at it only to be fired one day and not be able to move on to something else. They lost their mobility and became too rigid and comfortable seemingly unaware of how precarious their lives had been the whole time.

Always keep in mind that if you're not improving you're ultimately declining. So shake off the idea that your livelihood is guaranteed if you just show up and go through the motions, the world doesn't stop and neither should you. Take the time to examine yourself and what you want to have happen in your life then go out and pursue it without fear. Complacency can set in slowly but it is always a real threat to everything that you worked to build before it. Don't let it get you.

I have a lot of bookmarks that I have saved on Firefox and last night I was going through the list and deleting the ones I no longer needed. While cleaning up my bookmarks I noticed where I had saved information about a certain video camera and different lenses, stands, and microphones that could be attached to it. It gave me a sense of motivation not because I simply wanted the camera but it represented a goal that I have in mind which is to write my own screenplay and then film it as a low budget movie. This goal is preceded by my current goal of turning this site into a success and garnering enough traffic to earn a passive income and in fact rests on me doing so because I can’t very well have the freedom to film a movie working some crummy job everyday. This motivation I have been feeling for the past few months has been incredible and everyday something new inspires me again it’s like a perpetual kick in the ass that won’t let me give up. It’s a feeling of knowing that something is going to happen because you’re just so tuned into making it so that it is a foregone conclusion.

I remember for the past two years or so of my life sitting at work talking with my friend about how great it would be not to have a job and it always ended with the feeling that yes it would be great but it’s not realistic. It wasn’t until I sat down and made it my intention to find a way off the usual path that I really believed that it was possible for me not to work a crappy job and then graduate and get another job. My self belief has gotten to the point where I don’t even think about getting a job after I finish my degree because it’s not a part of who I am or who I want to become. Those fears of being forced into a life I don’t want have been replaced by goals both big and small, long term and short term. The change is in fact to stop thinking about what will happen to you and to rather think about how I am going to get where I want to go.

Once you open your mind up in this way things just start coming to you like ideas to write about or even new ways to make money. Last week while I was surfing the web a bit I was on a site and saw an ad for their ebook which was available for download. Now I’ve seen these ads probably thousands of times in all of the years I’ve been on the internet but it wasn’t until that instance that I thought about writing one myself. It never occurred to me that I could write and publish my own book online for a profit (and here I am publishing on the internet with this blog) perhaps I’m just stupid and overlooked an opportunity that was staring me right in the face or maybe it was the mindset I’ve developed for constantly looking for new opportunities. That one small image advertisement altered the course of work I plan on doing in the next few months and inspired me to begin planning my own ebook(s).

We human beings have a huge capacity for problem solving and when we’re motivated to do something you can better believe that a solution will be found. Too often our thoughts are attached to some responsibility or work instead of being free flowing and meditative which is usually where we come up with our most brilliant ideas that seem to be plucked from thin air. The desire that gives us our will to succeed brings forth all of these ideas and makes them easy to dream up, you start understanding more, connecting dots you didn’t know existed, and seeing angles that had previously escaped you. I don’t seem to ever worry about what to write anymore and now only focus on which idea I am going to develop for the blog today. Coming up with new ideas isn’t something I sit down and do, I just let them trickle in to my brain and then scribble down the idea however vague into my notebook. When I went to bed at around 3 AM this morning I had just finished listening to one of my audio books and wasn’t really focused on anything then this blog crossed my mind. Suddenly I had an idea and I got up out of bed to write it down. Then another one not more than 15 seconds after I had laid back down. This happened a total of four times before I finally fell asleep. As you can see, writer’s block should present much of a problem with inspiration like that.

So what is it that drives you in life? For me it seems to be having the freedom to create and express myself in a variety of ways. Think about what it is in your life that gives you that feeling of motivation like no other. Once you have that and start working towards getting there you will see the paths opening up even if it’s a roundabout way like mine. In order for me to manifest my desire to make a screenplay and film I chose to take this path of blogging to help raise the capital to finance my endeavors which still allows me to be creative and express myself. In a way I’m doing something that I enjoy to make a living to pursue something else I enjoy and I’m sure that will open up further opportunities for me. This drive should make you excited about waking up each day because at least half of the fun of setting a goal is the journey you take to get there and the knowledge that you will get there one day fuels your work ethic and creativity. Ponder your own life and find what it is that you want and the motivation will rise from there, mine all seems to be encapsulated on a single camera I don’t own (yet).