In a study conducted some years ago teenagers were asked before their exam what mark they expected to get to assess how accurately their belief matched their result. They found that boys tended to over estimate their results where as girls underestimated. As a result the boys were disappointed with their mark and the girls were pleasantly surprised. Given the choice I think most of us would prefer to come in higher than expected but as always there is more to the story. The boys on average tend to be over confident but with out going into it here it is important not to confuse low expectations with low self esteem. Confidence is closely linked to self esteem so while we want to lower our expectations we don’t want to lower confidence.
Overestimating is part of the human condition
Many experts say that optimism is an essential part of our well being. We have all heard a thousand times that to be successful you need to be confident in your ability. Believe and you shall achieve they say. This is of course true to a large degree and an idea I regularly promote. Why would you attempt something that seemed unachievable? Even the most pessimistic person attempting the impossible believes there is a slight chance of success. The reality is we humans on the whole tend to over estimate our chances of success and this is a good thing but does have some negative side effects. The truth is most progress comes from people who over estimate their real chances of success but somehow end up beating the odds. If we were always realistic about our chances of success there would be very little progress. So what is the downside?
The downside of overestimating our ability
The bad news is our generous overestimations can lead us to disappointment as shown in the above example which can in turn lead us to abandon our goals. Nearly every book I have ever read on success talks about the need to accept and embrace failure. The underlying theme is almost always the same. Failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, success. Failure is just a necessary part of the journey. Failure they say is actually a good thing because it shows you are stepping outside of your comfort zone. When you succeed the first time at a new endeavor the odds are it was luck or the challenge was too easy. The problem is most of us don’t like failure. When we fail we beat ourselves up and often completely give up on our goal. I have seen this with guitar students many times and their decision to give up is never based on logic. It is an emotional decision.
Failure is a relative experience
The point of paragraph one was not to compare boys with girls but to demonstrate how success and failure are relative experiences. If you find yourself wanting to give up guitar on a regular basis I suggest you take a closer look at your expectations. Wanting to give up by the way is not unusual. I certainly went through it as a teen and often felt like guitar was not worth the time and effort. When students pick up the guitar they tend to believe on average that they will be a half descent guitarist within six months. Six months later they are questioning their progress and whether it is all worth it. It just seems to be going slower than expected. Their perceived lack of progress may be real or imaginary depending on their expectations. Either way the feeling is the same. They feel they have not met their expectations and are therefore a failure.
You are not alone
Successful actors, musicians, dancers, pilots, surgeons, sports people, politicians, business people have all doubted themselves at times. No matter who they are or how great you think they are they have all questioned their ability and their level of talent rarely has anything to do with it. It is their personal expectations that determine failure or success in their minds. If failure feels like the norm to you then try lowering your expectations. Remember that giving up on your dream to play guitar is almost always an emotional decision rather than being based on facts. Guitar takes time to learn of which every great guitar player can testify.
Success Thinking and Actions – Success From Failure
In school we learn about fascinating things like addition and subtraction; multiplication and division; open and closed systems; evaporation and condensation; positive and negative; as well as a host of known opposites or counterarguments in almost every facet of life.
In life we also learn about night and day; yin and yang; war and peace…you get the idea.
These are all really flipsides of the same thing. The key principle is that one side can blend or transform into the other.
So it is with success and failure. What is failure but negative success? So how do we make the change from failure to success?
Simply take away the negative.
Positive thinking and positive actions bring about success. They equate with success thinking and actions.
The critical element is to link thinking with actions. This means positive thinking by itself is not enough. Even the usual understanding of positive thinking may need a new definition. To maximize its utility, it must incorporate all learning which can be extracted from failure.
Do you know what this implies? It means that failure must precede success! Shocking but true, and borne out in real-life experiences. Think about it: success needs a reference point for comparison. Without failure, success has no meaning; just as positive has no meaning unless set against negative; and condensation cannot occur without preceding evaporation.
How then to achieve success? Fail as fast and often as possible! Then success also comes fast and often as possible.
Failure? No problem, just flip it and achieve success.
It can be done with success thinking and actions.
