Chapter 1: Strategic Fail as Opposed to Passive Fail
What we’ll cover: Passive Failing vs Strategic Failing | Which is Better? | Why Strategically Failing is Great | The Science behind strategic failing
Types of Failures in Methodology
Most people in life are passively failing. The inordinate number of people who lack the success they truly want is actually just overwhelming. Most people claim to try and live successful lives, but the reality is that they are passively trying to fail. It became my greatest interest, even life obsession, to retool people and arm them with the skill and unconventional habit of trying to fail. That is to fail on purpose. To become strategic in failure, we are helping people get the actual result they truly want, failing, successfully. Sounds weird, humorous, or even paradoxical; however, you will learn it is a necessity for desired results!
The very first thing we must learn is the distinct difference between passive failing and strategic failing. When someone is passively failing they are pretending they want success, yet they are secretly in love with having failure and disappointment in their life or their endeavors. This does not make sense unless you understand the conscious and unconscious mind. In the passive failing mode, people make goals and they swing for the fences, consciously. They swing at the goals but miss, often very disproportionately so. This is because they lack skill, knowledge, and wisdom in their goal, but really because they rarely ever actually go for the goal. This is because they actually do not want the goals, subconsciously.
The goals are really a daydream of sorts to them, but not real dreams. This is because their mind has been compromised and the body has taken charge. Have you ever been in a situation where your body took charge of your mind? Some of you guys out there are cowards; your mind said go say hello to that young lady. Your body overrode the command and told you to stay put (it really said sit yo, you know what, right where you are). That’s real body control… forget MJ on the hoop court and MJ on the dance floor, that’s real body control! Although they consciously want the goal, the body has a completely different goal. With the body being in charge, the goal the mind seeks is abandoned, neglected, and the goal the body desires is attained and realized. This is passive failing. The body or unconscious mind will win because it owns the operating system at the time. Passive failures are ninety-nine percent of the time unaware of this.
Your author was in this position for years, until I learned to actually fail on purpose. My goals, the goals of the passive failure, sound good, but they don’t feel good. Therefore, I, nor other passive failures really go after them or if we did, we did it knowing we were not going to really succeed!
I know it’s weird, but it is also science. I came up with the term passively failing because these types of people pretend to want to succeed yet they are passively, even discreetly trying to fail (they just don’t know it). They are in fact so fearful of actually succeeding, and against what they truly want, they secretly sabotage any path that may bring them the day-dreamed result. It appears that way because they are one person. However, within us all are at least two members; the active mind and the inactive mind, better known as the conscious and subconscious. It’s two of you, this is why there is so much turmoil. It’s like getting married, this is why a marriage is a struggle after the honeymoon phase. The same with the conscious mind and subconscious; the new conscious mind is getting married to the habits of the body and they may contradict each other massively when new revelations are revealed. So there are like two of you, but mind-wise, it’s like a minimum of four of y’all.
Based on conditioning, there is literally a war going on over who will drive the car, that is the moveable body. The body is supposed to follow the orders from the mind, which in physical anatomy, acts as the brain. The brain gives the commands to the the body and the nerves act out upon the movement we need for the moveable body. Some people are lost right now, but don’t worry, especially if you’ve been conditioned to give up early, put this book down and go write your bad review now. Don’t waste your time! I mean it! Bad reviews are necessary for success, the world needs bad reviews; that one bad review out of thousands will weed out the tire kickers who say, “Oh, a bad review among a thousand, cats out the bag, this product/service doesn’t work.” Get out, and write the negative review, it is needed. Okay back to the point…
The worst of it is that most of these types of people (passive failures) do not even know they are trying to fail, trying to sabotage themselves. They can justify otherwise, with or against even the best state prosecutor or most expensive defense attorney. And through my personal case studies I learned that if they were given the blueprint, the benchmark, the diagram of how to go directly for their real (conscious) goal and result (the one they talk about and desire), they wouldn’t do it.
I, your author, was onto something there. I knew that this conflict would eat them up and continue to eat at them. That’s when I decided that I would somehow convince people to actually attempt to fail in life and that it would bring them or at the very least appear to bring them success. This way they would feel and be better off than trying to succeed in life. Far better than that, it would bring a reduction of stress and they’d fare better. I began to try this on myself, and then on family, and friends, and you won’t believe it! Really, you wouldn’t believe it! The results were amazing and not just short of.
Now people can succeed through a process that we called reverse osmosis or reverse-engineering osmosis (ReO or R2O). We could now effectively teach them how to have success in life, which they really don’t want to have. They do not want success because they had been compromised through conditioning and were imprisoned by their very own body (not the moveable body).
Our results have been outstanding needless to say. They have been phenomenal. The amount of stress we relieve in people by helping them to strategically fail in life (or in their endeavors) is the greatest testimonial we usually get from people. Adding to that, when we actively go for failure we actually can live better lives, as weird as that may sound. And don’t worry, we have the science to prove it (it will make more sense as we progress).
As we have alluded to, the other side of passive failing is strategic failing. In strategic failing, you are proposing to fail in things or objectives you set up. For example, if you are unemployed and looking for a new job, you would with keen diligence and with strategy find ways to get rejected from potential job opportunities. If it were passive failing, in the same situation, you would with keen diligence and strategy stay unemployed. Why? Because you don’t really want a job, you want to stay home with your kids, play Nintendo, watch youtube, and Netflix, chop it up on the phone in level-zero conversations, and take naps without worries.
The examples or fields are endless since one can fail at anything; in school, in work, in business, in their relationships, and in their health, whatever it is. Strategic failing is the failure system. All you have to do is plug into the system.
It is typical to think or believe that one must be burnt out on the street homeless to be a failure. Or that someone has to quit to fail. Nothing could be further from the truth. That is just merely one form of failure, there are many forms of failure that you will learn as you travel throughout the failure system. In many cases, it may not even be considered a failure. It may be a vacation of the most meager nature. Nevertheless, we want to make sure that people are direct in their desire to fall off the horse, not to pretend they fell off but absolutely fall off and drop off the darn horse.
Types of Failures in People
Quickly, there are four types of failures to be aware of in individual characteristics. We have the:
- classic failure
- the unfortunate failure
- the fortunate or blessed failure
- and the miserable failure.
In general, the classic failure simply doesn’t know what’s going on, therefore they miss out, miss marks, and are late to and on everything (these would benefit greatly in the strategic failing methodology). The classic failure typically lacks awareness, knowledge, skillsets, wisdom, understanding, and resources, and they just don’t know what they don’t know.
The unfortunate failure is aware and actually tries to succeed in life and in things; they have the potential simply because they know or are aware something isn’t right. They can feel, see, taste, smell, and touch a difference in their life and the life of others around them. They know if others did it, then it can be done by them. However, bad luck knocks them down and they are often discouraged from getting up. They are aware, often equipped, and have the knowledge to a degree, aware of what’s going on, but they haven’t been released from the bonds of the body. They are at war with the body and they may not even know it. They resist by force and will.
They try to succeed but continue to run into unfortunate happenstances, which are really the body pushing against the desires of the mind. They often get up but way beyond the customary ten-count; they believe the match is over. They realize the match isn’t over so they try again and get knocked out again.
The miserable failure has been slapped in the face so hard, they refuse to ever try again. They quit and that is the ultimate success in failure. They have succumbed to the body; you can find them worshipping the body with chants of, “Oh great body, I (the original master), submit to you!” They’ve been beaten up so badly, conditioned, and terribly programmed that they willfully submit to the body.
The fortunate failure uses failure to succeed. A better way for me to say this is that they use the failure system to get the results they actually want in life. They liberate themselves from the body and thus gain free reins over the moveable body to create what they want, success, stresslessness, or both!
Which method is better (passive or strategic)?
Well, obviously we will lean towards the side of being very strategic and specific with your desire for failure. In order to be a great failure one of the keys is being passive, definitively speaking. Therefore passive failures will actually probably appear to have more success at failing. The only problem is that passive failing also contributes to perhaps the highest levels of stress among people. If you remain very purposeful in trying to fail, then you will enjoy more constructive (strategic) failure and less stress with your failure.
Strategic failing makes the most sense because it takes the stress out of being a failure. If you tried to do something that you’re already doing and you get a better plan in going about doing it, you will undoubtedly feel better about not getting better, better. You will not believe how many lives we’ve impacted by just simply showing the difference between passive failing and strategic failing.
Passive and Strategic Failing in the Real World
How does this work in the real world, what are we saying plainly? Let’s say you’re trying to start a blog, write a book, or start a business. There are a lot of moving parts in this but in general, you have an objective or goal. Write the book, start the blog, and start the business. In Richard Koch’s book, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less, he stressed the importance of identifying the twenty percent that produces the eighty percent of the positive results in a structure. Earlier, the four-character or groups of types of failures were introduced. They were the classic failure, unfortunate failure, miserable failure, and blessed failure.
If we use quadrants like our friend from Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Robert Kiyosaki), we’d have the four quadrants also. The classic failure, the miserable failure, unfortunate, and fortunate failure; here is how they would line up.
Classic (Passive)
(Unaware, Follower, Not in the Game, Can’t Play bc Don’t Know a Game is Being Played)
Miserable (Passive)
(Aware, Enslaved, Beatdown/Afraid, Can’t Play bc Has Given Up on the Game Being Played)
Unfortunate (Passive)
(Aware, Enslaved, Lacks Resources, Playing but Not Good Gets Poor Results bc of Lack of Skillsets and Knowledge)
Fortunate (Strategic)
(Aware, Strategic, Purposeful, Lives with Results Comfortably, Playing at Good to High Levels)
“The twenty percent” (20%) of this quadrant would be the fortunate failure. The eighty percent (80%) would be the remaining three quadrants. The fortunate failures in life produce eighty percent of the results in the world. The classic, miserable, and unfortunate failures produce only twenty percent of the results in the world. The Failure System (TFS) will address everyone. So let’s focus on the twenty percent where we have the above objectives, i.e. write a book, start a blog, or start a business.
These folks want to get it done, but like everyone, they will have challenges. They are going to go from passive failure to strategic by making a goal every “chunk” of the way to fail at and during the process. To write a book, they are not going to make the goal to write five pages a day. Nope, their confidence can get shattered if they only produce three pages or one. This could end the trip. One page in the average Word document is like four to five hundred words a page, so five pages are like twenty to twenty-five hundred words. Strategic Failing objective would take this approach, waste an hour a day jumbling twenty to twenty-five hundred words together a day (to, at a later date, make sense of). His objective is to waste an hour a day jumbling; they will jumble words, thoughts, and ideas together whether they like what they wrote or not.
It does depend on the desired result they are looking for. Do they want success or do they want stresslessness/relief or both? The fortunate failure, with the desire to have success through failure, will waste an hour a day conjugating or jumbling twenty to twenty-five hundred words together. If someone asked them what they were doing, they would respond by saying something like, “Nothing, just squandering off an hour jumbling words together, I’ll hit you back later (really don’t answer the phone)!”
The other end of the fortunate failure for success (FFS) is the fortunate failure for relief or stresslessness (FFR). This person is going to consciously “act” in the way an unfortunate failure (UF) would behave. Why? They are going to relieve stress and are going to be content with the results. They also want to write a book, but they are feeling overwhelmed with a lack of ideas, fidgetiness, lack of concentration, the dogs barking, and the kids are on the way. They are not going to make twenty hundred words; thus they are not going to squander the hour jumbling. Instead, they will find the most stress-releasing activity they can afford and engage in.
This could be youtube, Instagram, yahoo news, nba.com, reality tv, a walk in the park, running errands to the store, Stephen A. Smith, Skip Bayless, Shannon Sharpe, Housewives, daytime TV, or any other distraction that they find comfort in. They will corrode the hour on this activity and feel good about it. At the end of the day, when they ask themselves, “What did I accomplish?” They can look themselves square in the eyes and say, “We set out to bankrupt and deplete an hour or more of time to watch reality TV, and gosh darn it, we reached our goal and it felt good!” Sounds crazy, but you just prevented a quart of cortisol from pumping into the body (especially if you learn a little secret called renew).
For the eighty percent group, which consists of the classic failure (CF), miserable-failure (MF), and unfortunate failures (UF), theirs would be different. Let’s imagine they have the same objective, i.e. write a book, start a blog, or start a business, it would be different as you can imagine. The first group, fortunate failures, are okay working, especially the FFS group. The FFRs just don’t like past results they’ve often got and the process to which they took. This led them to become discouraged. This is why we gave them permission to fail in order to relieve stress, i.e., watch youtube/Instagram or Yahoo News.
However, for the eighty percent, the bulk of them will come out of the UF group, because they are still playing. All three groups (CF, MF, UF) are fearful and very sensitive, and the mere thought and goal of writing a book pump cortisol throughout the body in the form of anxiety and stress. This is why it rarely comes to the mind of the CF, the MF has already thought upon it and perhaps tried and took their lack of success miserably. This leaves the UF. Their goal is thwarted from the start. They naturally go right into their passive failure mode by over-stressing, perfectionism, and “gotta get it right” modes, which in itself is too stressful.
The goal here would not be to waste or squander an hour a day jumbling twenty to twenty-five hundred words together a day. Nope, that’s a negative mate. The goal instead for them is to consciously place themselves in the FFR group for starters and ease the stress. They can then consciously work on graduating from the FFS group, but they have to remain conscious the entire time. Any lapses will find them back in their respective groups. Once again, the best way to ease the stress is to do stress-relieving related activities that have historically produced little to no results aside from temporarily reducing stress.
When this is done on purpose, that is strategic, the stresslessness lasts longer and can even become permanent. The stress-relieving activities of Instagram, youtube, Facebook, meme watching, laughing, bingeing on ice cream, NetFlix, and potato chips, are the way to go. So their goals are totally different. To start the book, eighty percent would watch a video on how to start writing a book, a few motivational videos, then an hour or two of viral videos, or Facebook or Instagram scrolling. Once the stress-relieving activity is done, write down the idea of the book or a sentence or two, and share it with your most negative critic. This is Strategic Failing; The Failure System.
