I want to do something different in this post. Much of what you see on social media and blogs out there paints a picture of an ideal life of happiness and an uninterrupted string of wins that have many of us asking, what’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I winning like that? I think this is the source of much of the depression in young people nowadays. We are not leaving any room for failure. We are not acknowledging down time and self doubt that arises in many of us and dissuades is from continuing to try. Just take a look at the matrix below of how different social media sites make young people feel.

Source: The Economist

Most successful people did not get it right on the first try. It took years of honing their craft when no one cared and no one was watching for them to shine. Be it an athlete that spent years training when they could have been having fun or partying with friends, or the entrepreneur that spent months or even years eating dirt to perfect their product, their service or their skill to the point where it made them wildly successful. All people see is the success, it’s all they focus on and they think it was easy up to that point or it came overnight.

To break this cycle and write a post that is a bit more relatable to readers, rather than share my successes so far in 2019 I want to share with you some of my top failures and disappointments in myself. I truly believe that acknowledging these and letting them go, saps their mental hold on me and allows me to shake off the self doubt and press on ahead, better and wiser for having tried. These are in no particular order, it’s just a list of things that I did not succeed at, but there is always a chance to change that, with that said, let’s take a look at my top failures so far of 2019.

My Top Failures

• Not Exercising – I have been working out at least 3 times a week pretty consistently since I was about 15. I have had years where that slowed down or stopped for a few months but I have been in a real rut since December of last year when I went on vacation. I stayed at a resort in Mexico, drank a lot, got chubby (for me at least) and never really picked up my routine again. I only recently started making the 11 Mike track each way to work by bike a few times a week, which really helped me stay in shape while working long hours in the past. This I can improve with mindset and adjusting my routine a bit.

• Drinking Too Much – I admit, I like to drink. I don’t get sloshed like I did in my younger days, I don’t have that same need to escape, I am more in control of my happiness now. However I do a lot of socializing around drinking and being in New York means I have very convenient access to bars at pretty much any instant. When I look back on the last 3 months, I didn’t really go crazy but when you add up the nights I had a few before going home, it was probably an amount of money I’m a little embarrassed to say I spent on alcohol. Not to mention the productivity wasted both on my blog and at work by not being 100% mentally and physically the next day. How many opportunities did I lose or posts I didn’t write because I was a bit hung over and ideas didn’t come to me as quickly? I will never know.

• Writing My Book – I started the year full of energy. Not only did I restart this blog but I vowed to finally takes steps towards achieving on of my long term goals: writing a book. It doesn’t have to be a specific topic but I have always wanted to write one. I made progress by deciding on a topic and actually sitting down and taking the time to start to write one. Sometimes the first step of just getting some words down is the hardest. I did that one night and so far that is all I did. I had rationalized it in terms of if I write 1500 words towards my book a week, by 40 weeks, I would have about 60,000 words completed, enough for about a 200 page book. So far all I have is that: 1500 words.

• Keeping A Poor Sleeping Schedule – This one really affected a lot of things in the last three months: my daily mood, my productivity, my time with my son and the quality of my output. I really tend to punish myself during the week, sleeping very little, 4-5 hours a night and then crashing on Friday night and sleeping 9-10 hours. Even when I get up after my long sleep, I am groggy all morning and it really affects the quality of the time I have with my son on the weekend. This is where I really feel the impact, I would really prefer to jump up and have the energy he craves on Saturday morning so that we can really maximize the excitement of our time together.

• Letting Other People’s Actions Get to Me – This is a hard one because it’s not about other people, it’s really about me. There’s no reason that other people’s actions have to control my emotions but from time to time I let it happen. I let whatever person and their negative sentiments take a place in my head for far to long and I have them much too much real estate for what they were giving me. For this I can say I have improved in recognizing the cycle of negative thinking and breaking it before it takes up hours or days on end of my thinking but I still have to grapple with it from time to time.

• My Instagram Page – I tried something new recently, to see if I could drive more traffic to my site via Instagram. It took me some time to decide upon a strategy for content and how to present it. I then decided on a strategy to get more followers by making a flurry of commenting activity on top posts. At one point, I was growing my followers by 40-50 per day. When I hit a plateau of about 420 followers though, I stopped my commenting strategy and my followers began to slowly decline. I haven’t really picked up my commenting for followers strategy since and I have dropped down to about 350 followers. I have gotten some traffic via Instagram but it has been a few drops, not the steady stream I was hoping for.

It’s Not All Negative

Taking the time to write these out has actually made me realize the little tweaks in my daily routine I can try to make to eliminate failures like this down the road. Others, such as my Instagram strategy may require a complete overhaul of what I am trying to do and move in a different direction. Of all my failures though, I can say there are many things to celebrate.

One of those is that I have passed the time period of consistent writing when I first gave up on my blog, I wrote consistently for about 3 months back in 2016 and have now passed the 3 month mark with only one post coming a day late.

Another is that I have actually taken some steps towards monetizing my site by placing a few ads here and there as well as signing up for affiliate programs. The next step will be to try and create stronger content and engage advertisers more proactively to see if I can start to push the boundaries and increase my readership and income. I am sure there will be stumbles on the way but that’s part of the adventure of this endeavor.

Additionally, I have had some really productive stretches, where I was accomplishing a lot at work, cooking all my meals to save money and writing strong content for my blog. Those stretches have shown me that I can continue to improve and push myself. I have wrapped myself in a cocoon of positivity and for the first time in much of my adult life, left the daily routine of being a news junkie, as I determined it wasn’t really adding value to my life and the information and data I was getting from writing and researching my blog was actually adding more value to my social and professional life.

Conclusion

Failure is the birth of your next success. As I wrote a few days ago in my post Motivation 101 I have been really inspired in the last few days by all the stories I have been hearing about the drive and the philosophy of Nipsey Hussle. The emoji of the racing flag has become ubiquitous on Instagram as a symbol of what he called the marathon. The idea behind this was that your career, your passion and your life are a marathon not a sprint and you have to make those little efforts day in and day out with the long game in mind. It’s a great metaphor for pushing on and I was happy to see his story featured Ins more positive light in the Wall Street Journal this past week.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Thr above are just stumbles in the marathon, and I plan to keep going. 🏁

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