How To Fail Successfully – Part 2

This is part 2 of a light-hearted look at ten steps to apply to guarantee you fail at everything in your life.

Step 6: Minimise performance preparation

People who are effective take time to prepare. Avoid this like the plague.  Also make sure you avoid any kind of mental routines that get you in the right frame of mind to perform well. When you have an important meeting, make sure you are do not prepare at all.  Instead, assume that everything is just going to work out for the best. And definitely avoid thinking about what problems might happen, and how you might manage them. If things go wrong in your business make sure you hold on to the dream of a quick-fix. Better still, don’t trust your own ability.  Take advice about your problems from absolutely everyone you talk to. That way you can move further and further away from your own thoughts and ability to solve problems. And when you come under pressure you will have no resources of your own to draw on. Then you can easily fall short or fail. This is guaranteed to support consistent failure.

Step 7: Avoid staying in the present

This is a key strategy for ensuring you do not achieve any kind of success.  At work keep thinking about what could have been achieved if ‘I had only done xyz…’ If somehow, you find yourself slipping into the present and focusing on one step at a time jump into the future and think about all the things that could go wrong…  ‘What if my project doesn’t succeed? What if my presentation flops?’ Alternatively, think about how successful your current project could be and the difference it could make to your business, but don’t do anything about it. That way you can hold on to the feeling that you are doing everything well without getting too involved with the messy business of trying to be more than you already are.

Step 8: Learn how to distract yourself

To ensure failure in your business it is crucial that you learn how to distract yourself easily, and develop a short span of attention. This means you should avoid anything that might represent any kind of success routine – no relaxation techniques, no recall of past successes, no imagining yourself being successful, and definitely no positive self-talk. Any kind of success routine is only likely to cause you to relax and concentrate at gradually deeper levels and when that happens your true potential begins to emerge. And if you find yourself in the unlucky situation of being effective at work, take the following steps. Stop eating and drinking water and triple your caffeine intake. If the hunger and thirst doesn’t get you, the caffeine will. The caffeine will speed you up so much you won’t be able to spell ‘focus’ let alone do it. If you’re really lucky though, you will be able to work up a half decent attack of the jitters and you won’t be good for anything for the rest of the day.

Step 9: Constantly imagine failure

If you are really going to build your abilities to fail then you need to constantly picture yourself failing. Therefore, make sure you don’t imagine yourself working well, succeeding or managing whatever challenges you might encounter. A better option is to imagine yourself making mistakes, embarrassing yourself in front of your customers and seeing yourself fail at every possible moment. Keep picturing the worst possible scenario in every situation and imagine the effects that it will have. To truly paralyze yourself, picture a giant movie screen just out in front of you that has 24hr repeats of you failing. And make sure you think about all the negative feelings associated with those failures constantly. Only then will a solid relationship with failure develop.

Step 10: Cultivate Mental Softness

The ability to bounce back when things go wrong at work, is important in being able to fully achieve your goals. If you want to constantly fail you need to develop mental softness instead. Begin by developing expectations of yourself that you can’t possibly achieve and then expect your work to go perfectly. Just because perfection in business is difficult to achieve doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t expect perfection every time. To get really mentally soft though, you need to learn to give up at the first sign of any obstacle or things not going your way.  At your work make other people responsible– if you are really lucky you will find an excuse. If you practice mental softness in this way often enough, it will become so normal that you won’t even have to think about it. Then (and only then) will you be able to avoid thinking like a champion. Otherwise you will find yourself making a promise to be responsible for yourself, to treat obstacles as temporary, and to see setbacks as a potential source of opportunity. That will only lead to success.

Remember. Constant failure is not accidental. You have to work at it. Follow the ten steps of the Total Failure Management (TFM) programme and you can have failure as much as you want, as often as you want. What could be easier?

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