📧 Email subscribers: 45.701 / 100.000 👥 Active users: 1.563 🎞 New Mini Documentary: Overthinking - Final touches ⏰ Time it took to write: 8 hours 14 minutes
Failure
It's scary just to read. 😰
We associate negative emotions with it and are simply afraid of it.
We don't want to fail!
Failure is bad, it must be avoided at all costs! 🥵
But what if I told you that what you believed about failure is wrong? 🤔
What if I could change your perception of failure in 15 minutes? 🤨
Well, that's exactly the purpose of today's Post, so, it's time to change your perspective on failure together!
But before we dive into that, let's see... 🏊🏼♂️
🚀 How's the challenge?
🤓 I'm holding a Reading Week
Alex Hormozi pointed out that the biggest problem for BookBase is the number of cancellations. So, I decided to find the 7 best books on this topic and "grind" them all in 1-2 weeks! 📚
I need to know all of them to have the information I need to make good decisions! So, in addition to my usual weekly tasks, when I have some free time, I read. At half time of a football game, on the toilet, and even in lieu of my minimal Netflixing.
🎞️ Overthinking Documentary coming soon
Geri is putting the finishing touches on it and if all goes well, we'll publish it next Saturday! I haven't even seen the final yet, but I'm really looking forward to it! 😬
The giveaway we gave to those who watched it in the first hour worked really well last time. So, we're taking it further, now we're going to give an Overthinking Prevention Checklist to those who watch the video the first DAY! It took me a whopping 4 hours to put together to make it succinct and valuable. 📝
In the meantime, here is the Trailer:
🎨 Rethinking the Reading Page
We've had a lot of people tell us that the reading page is overcrowded and all the text is in one place. So, it's time to work on that and create a more comfortable experience. 🙏🏻
Kokesz redesigned the whole page, we tested it with some power users and the new solution came out. Dani will work on reformatting the old summaries to look like this.
🥳 Event for 200 people
Finally, there is a potential venue that is sufficiently "cool" and can accommodate 200 people. Bogi and Joci are working hard to get the best possible venue for this event too. 👨🏽💻👩🏽💻
No exact date yet, but it will most likely be the end of November and a weekend (Friday or Saturday). 🗓️
No speakers have been confirmed yet, but, with the topics that have already been raised, I've almost blown my mind...
"How to finance your start-up?"
"How to handle the teething problems mentally?"
etc.
Ticket sales haven't started yet, but they will soon. 🔥
In the meantime, here's a waiting list if you don't want to miss out:
It's important to get the basics right, because I think many people would already, here at the first question, give the wrong answer. 🤨
A huge misconception is when we say we fear failure.
If you play around with the idea, you'll quickly realize that:
"It's not failure we really fear, it's that others see us failing."
Just think, when you practice free kicks on your own and miss them, you don't feel so bad. But imagine the same situation in an important match with nearly 1,000 people watching you, the stakes are much higher. Right? 🧐
And the 2 kicks are almost the same!
Yet the second situation is much scarier. 😩
Same with many people in oral exams. At home you can tell yourself or your parents perfectly well, but when 4 strangers are sitting in front of you, the situation changes. You have the same knowledge; you just can't bring it to the surface.
So, once we understand the real answer to this question, we can move on to the next point.
🧐 How can this be helped?
There are 2 basic rules that can easily help you to really perceive failure in a different way.
First, we need to recognize that everyone fails! 😨
There is no person who doesn't make a mistake at some point. The more you do things that are out of your comfort zone, the more you will make mistakes.
So basically, we don't need to reduce making mistakes to 0, we need to change our perception of making mistakes. 🔄
And from this idea comes the 2nd rule, and that is:
Every mistake, is an opportunity to improve. 💡
If we perceive failure in this way, and not as total annihilation, we can be more liberated. It's true that this is easier said than done, but I'll give you one or two examples:
When I was 20, I was terrified of failure, terrified of what other people would think of me! That was exactly what paralyzed me. 😔
I only dared to do things that I had experience in or was really good at. However, there were very few of those areas. So, I was almost always stuck in my comfort zone.
That was my range of movement at the time and it was a very small space, not to say boring. 😕
My trip to Italy and Ryan Holiday's book "The Obstacle is the way" helped me to overcome this bad perception completely.
Because I was in a foreign place and no one knew me, I could do almost anything, because even if I failed at it, no one saw me and gave me a second opinion. So, I started trying more and more new things and lo and behold I failed more and more! 😰
But then came the liberating realization that it's not so bad anyway!
I started Thai Boxing outside and after a few months of intensive "training", I was able to train with an Italian Champion during one of my training sessions. He was preparing to fight for the title and had been training in several gyms around the country, only his training partner here fell ill and I was in the gym. True, I was able to give him a surprise or two, but it still ended up being a big FAIL:
Did it hurt? 🥊
Physically quite a bit, but mentally it freed me up so that it didn't affect me anymore!
In fact, it was a completely different experience...
Rather than defending my ego, I listened humbly and learned a lot from him during the match. 🙏🏻
💡 Side note: There is no room for softness in a training session like this, you have to fight! Regardless of the way I looked at the end, we had a great chat afterwards and he thanked me for helping him out in that situation.
📕 Book Recommendation: 'Ego the Enemy' by Ryan Holiday was a great help to me when it came to martial arts. Instead of defending my ego after every defeat, I looked for opportunities to learn from the other person that they were better than me. You'll find it at BookBase! 🎧
But, before you think that the only way to overcome the fear of failure is to beat your face in, I'll give you another example!
In Beer Pong (or beer pong in English, but that sounds kind of lame), we had a Championship for exchange students every Tuesday. I immediately entered the first one with a Spanish friend and immediately...
We lost, but not just like that...
We couldn't even put 1 in the opponent's cup. Everybody laughed at us, but the cruel thing is that we were laughing at ourselves, we were so lame! 🍺
💡 Side note: I didn't do this consciously at the time, I just read in a psychology book that it really works. If they are making fun of you, you laugh at yourself, "take their joke" and once you take it, they will stop laughing at you and leave you alone.
I'm not saying it didn't hurt, but it didn't affect me that much. After that, sometimes we'd have a 1-1 house party and see what happened...
1 month later we won the Beer Pong Championship! 🏆
I didn't tell you these stories to show you how awesome I am at Beer Pong (which I don't think is true) or how hard it is to be in the same ring as an Italian champion, but rather to show you the opportunity...
Once you finally get over your fear of failure, you can look forward to a much more liberated life! 🤩
📕 Book Recommendation: David Goggins is a great preacher on this topic. He has a brilliant book up on BookBase called "You Can't Hurt Me". I might add that the whole book has recently been translated into English under the title "You have no power over me". 🎧
However, I can also understand if someone is still terrified of failure and simply cannot bring themselves to act. Well in this case, I bring you a quote from an older Post I wrote about overcoming fears:
"To overcome fears easily, you need to create a safe environment for yourself. For example, if you're afraid of dogs, go over to a friend's house who has a dog and ask them to let you pet their dog under their supervision.
That way your fear will be much less, as whatever happens there your friend and the moment you pet the dog, your fear will be significantly reduced. Because you have had a positive experience."
It's the same with failures! First you fail alone, then in front of your friends, then in front of a slightly bigger audience and so on and so on. After a while, you won't care at all and you'll dare to do a lot of things! 😉
⚠️ It's important to remember that this is also a scale!
There is no such thing as someone who is not afraid of failure at all or afraid of all failure. It's more a question of how much failure are you not afraid of yet? 🤔
And your job is to try to move this scale up and up, day by day!
I'm human too, I'm afraid of certain failures, that's why I work every day to make sure that by the time I reach that trial, it doesn't have power over me! Don't be afraid to fail!
Before we go on to the specific list...
Did you know: For every person you send the Blog to who subscribes you will receive gifts! And quite valuable ones at that:
1️⃣ Invited - 🧭 Guideline Targeting Ebook 3️⃣ invited - 📙 Exclusive Workbook with Practical Tasks (with the most useful books I've read) 🔟 invited - 🎥 Self-confidence Course with 11 videos (showing you specifically how to be more confident in business, meeting people and making friends)
Thank you! 🧡
✅ What exactly do you do?
[ ] First step, make yourself aware that everyone makes mistakes and that's okay! But being afraid of making mistakes is! 🧠
[ ] Step two, read/listen to the summary of the book Obstacle is the Way! This will give you a good mental foundation. 📕
[ ] Step 3, find 1 thing you would like to try but have not dared to do yet. It could be anything, wakeboarding, giving a lecture, Thai boxing or even a date night call.🥊
[ ] Step four, see what's the easiest thing you could try? How could you create a safe environment for yourself? 🤔
[ ] Step five, now that you have the perfect plan, it's time to ACT! 💪🏼
This post is literally worth nothing if you don't start making a change! ❌
It's you, it's your life, I can show you the way to go, but YOU have to walk it!
I sincerely hope this article has been helpful and that it will change the lives of some young people! 🙏🏻
And don't forget every single Failure is an Opportunity to grow!
🔥 Biggest obstacle
Getting this new Giga Update delivered on time. Because the work of several people has to be perfectly coordinated! It's like optimizing the engine of a racing car to infinity, that's exactly how we feel.
🎨 Kokesz makes the new designs and codes them.
👨🏽💻 Edu is rewriting the Backend to make the App significantly faster.
📝 Meanwhile Dani is going through all the books and formatting them nicely.
📚 Bögszi writes the new summaries.
🛠️ And Ricsi helps Kokesz with the coding of the Webapp.
And then there's me, trying to balance the work of the others to make the best use of resources, while also trying to keep up with my own tasks!
I can honestly say that it's not easy, but I'm brutally enjoying it! It is probably the job I enjoy the most, when it comes to thinking creatively and finding quick solutions to problems that arise. 😎
And finally, a huge shout out to the guys, as each and every one of them puts their heart and soul into making this Update really that big and really on time!
Thanks guys! 🙏🏻
📖 What have I just read?
I mentioned that I'm really into reading right now to solve our cancellation problem at BookBase. So, I'm through quite a few books this week! It's important to note that I almost never read all the way through a book, only the most important chapters, which for these books is about 30-40% of the book. And I usually read on Kindle so I can start immediately and not have to wait weeks for delivery. 📖
Customer Success - Nick Mehta
Not a bad book, but the knowledge that was in it wasn't very penetrating. It was more useful from a technology perspective so that we know what we will need to incorporate into BookBase. Also, how to measure user satisfaction.
Hacking Growth - Sean Ellis
Now this is a treasure! There's an incredible amount of valuable knowledge in there. Imagine, as I started reading it, I went on Vinted during one of my breaks and this was the first book that came to my attention. I bought it immediately! Honestly how many chances are there for a rare English book to come right in front of you while you are reading it!
There are some books that I love to have on my shelf. This is one of those! 📚
Never Lose a Customer - Joey Coleman
I'm still reading this book; I can't put it down! I think I'm going to read more than 40% of the book here because it's so exciting and useful at the same time.
Important to note, these books are very specific and there is very little chance that this would be useful to YOU in your current life! That is why I have not put them in Book Recommendations. ❌
🎧 What have I just listened to?
The Arc Browser just came out with AI features and I watched a LIVE announcement about it, it was brilliant! 5 new AI features came out that are mind blowing! 🤖
My brother sent me a German song that they listen to in America. I'm not that much of a fan of German rap, but this song is really good: https://spotify.link/nyqkxlgmCDb
✍🏼 Top quote
"Most people know what they should do, yet they don't do it. So, they don't fail because of ignorance, they fail because of fear! " ~ Alex Hormozi
"Most people already know what to do and simply don't do it. It's not ignorance. It's fear." ~ Alex Hormozi
🧪 Question of the week
I would especially appreciate if you could elaborate on your opinion in response to this email. Relax, I'm the only one who can see that, no one else! I promise I will answer all of them! 🙏🏻
