If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re an aspiring iconoclast. Your target? The American Dream.

To you, nothing sounds less natural than slaving away for forty years at some insignificant job while constantly hoping you’ll be promoted so you can finally make six figures, afford the things you don’t need and spend even more time working. All this with the expectation that when you finally get to retire in your late sixties you’ll have all the money you need to do all the things you ever wanted to do (which, incidentally, could have been done on less than half of what you made yearly). But, of course, you’ll end up in bad health or dead long before you ever get the chance.

It’s hard to say exactly who or what made the idea of a “deferred-life” so acceptable and so common. That we would choose to experience those things which are best enjoyed in our youth while we’re at an old, decrepit age and suffer menial, uninspired work until we reach that age are both testaments to what a lifeless, unexamined people we’ve become.

How can we avoid mediocrity? How can we avoid wage slavery? How can we be the people we want to be and do the things we aspire to do? How can we not only dream the dreams that great men dream, but also be great men in practice? How might we destroy this institution that places certainty above happiness?

The answer might surprise you. Our weapon of choice… is failure.

Why we fight the lives we want

We fight because we’re afraid. On the surface, we appear to be afraid of homelessness or hunger or disappointing people or not being able to afford the right kind of car or losing status. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see the root of our fear. We are all afraid of failure. We are afraid of setting out on our own and putting every ounce of our being into the lives we want, only to have our dreams dashed upon the jagged rocks of reality.

The average person thinks of failure as something to be avoided whereas the extraordinary person thrives on it. This is the difference between your city’s dog catcher and Barack Obama, between your local IT guy and Steve Jobs. Great people understand that failure isn’t the destination, it’s a road sign on your path to success.

Settle for good enough

When you are thinking about launching a new business or a new product or writing a new ebook, you might come down with Perfectionist Syndrome. You’ll be so afraid of failure that you spend plenty of time planning and working on your project privately, but you’ll never feel comfortable pushing it to the public. You’ll worry about what people will think and about what they will say. You’ll worry that in the end no one will want it, that you’ll be an embarrassment to yourself and to everyone you mentioned the project to.

This is just some exaggeration courtesy of your brain. What if your product fails? Would you really give up? If you would actually give up, this kind of lifestyle probably won’t suit you very well anyway. Think rationally about it. Failure is a lesson learned, but failure is not permanent. Whatever you are planning to do, just do it. Any move is a good move, even if it’s the wrong move. At the least you’ll learn how not to do things, but more than likely you’ll be able to transform that failure into a success if you just let yourself get carried by the wind.

Carried by the wind

If you dream of being a web worker or any kind of entrepreneur in this day and age, there are two skills you need to have to ensure the transformation of a failure into a success — adaptability and agility.

Adaptability is your ability to adjust to whatever situation is thrown at you, to be able to turn any situation into an opportunity to grow your business. This is what I mean by letting yourself be carried by the wind. Go wherever you are pushed to go. If things are failing, set yourself a new path and go for it. If that fails, set another path. You’ll eventually be able to target exactly where your project needs to be.

Agility is your ability to adapt as quickly as possible. When you find yourself in competition with larger businesses, this is the one thing that is guaranteed to tilt things in your favor. As a freelancer or small business, you can change things up way faster than corporations can. This leaves you with the ability to jump on trends and switch directions without huge bureaucratic processes slowing you down.

Conclusion

Failure is not something to be afraid of. Failure is a sign that you are doing something, that you are stepping outside of the box and leaving yourself open to success. This makes you part of a courageous minority. It’s true, as Tim Ferriss says, that most people choose unhappiness over uncertainty, but we aren’t most people. With adaptability and agility, no failure will be a failure for long.

Stop postponing your greatness. Embrace failure.

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