Hello Everyone,

I hope you’re all mastering productivity with the principle you learned last week.

This week, I’m just going to share a few more thoughts on Failure & Haters.

Two Ways To Think Of Failure.

Thomas Edison and Henry Ford are controversial today - and for good reason.

But we should not ignore the lessons of their lives because of this. They were two of the most successful men of their era. They came from nothing and rose to immense success. Both of them were largely self-taught and supposedly destined for nothing - and yet their legacies live on even today.

Edison and Ford were contemporaries - even rivals on occasion. Both of them however, would have loved the other’s method of viewing failure. The perspectives they carried on it, differed greatly from the attitudes of their time and ours. They both hungered for the right kind of failure. The failure from bold action, not the slow-death kind of failure through inaction.

Ford and Edison found themselves hitting roadblocks, setbacks, and obstacles. They failed again and again. Not only during their steep climb to success - but even when they had reached the pinnacle of their success.

Except, neither of these men would have thought about any of these setbacks as “failure”.

For Ford, he had grown up with a love for anything mechanical. Every time something didn’t work for him, it was “a malfunction”. It wasn’t a failure, it was a way that something wouldn’t work. It was a signal for something that needed improving. It put him one step closer to whatever would finally work.

Edison was similar. While he didn’t use the word malfunction, he treated everything as an experiment. If something didn’t work out, it wasn’t a “failure”. Instead, it was a negative result - and any experiment that yielded a result (even a negative one), had yielded knowledge. In his mind, anything that helped him gain knowledge could not be a failure.

If you have decided to put yourself in “the arena” as Teddy Roosevelt would say, you’re going to come across setbacks. When we do, we need to change our mind about what these setbacks mean. They’re not failures that harm us. At worst, they’re a malfunction on our way to our goal. If we’re really disciplined, we can see it as a negative result in our latest experiment - an experiment that has given us valuable knowledge.

This makes it much easier to test our ideas, our learning, and our assumptions. We can lower the pressure by treating it all as an attempt for us to gain knowledge.

We need not fear the obstacles in our path - as the title of Ryan Holiday’s book goes: The Obstacle Is The Way.

Two Simple Strategies To Deal With Haters / Snipers.

Now, even if we’re okay with encountering setbacks, we’re going to get booed while in “the arena”. It’s just a tax we have to pay if we want to do great things in our lives.

Every one of us has encountered people that try to bring us down. They make snarky comments, undermine your progress, gossip about you, and essentially, just see a target on your back.

If we’re not careful, these things can actually ruin our progress - they can force us to conform with their (usually depressing) way of living.

So, to help in our war against these types of people, here are two simple strategies to deal with them:

1. Would you resent a fig tree?

One of my favourite quotes in all of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is about dealing with difficult people:

“That sort of person is bound to do that. You might as well resent a fig tree for secreting juice. (Anyway, before very long you’ll both be dead - dead and soon forgotten.)”

Some people are born assholes. They’ll live as assholes. They’ll die as assholes.

Haters are some of those people. David Schwartz, the author of The Magic of Thinking Big, calls them snipers. Snipers, he tells the reader, are “psychologically sick”. It’s not the happy people who throw stones at those striving to do better - only the insecure and envious do that.

All this to say: It’s not about you.

Almost always, the words of critics / snipers / haters, are a reflection of their internal world. They’re cowards, undisciplined, and spiteful. You wouldn’t take their life advice - so why take their hatred?

Remind yourself of the fig tree quote and either use their words as fuel 0r forget them.

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Interested in identifying and understanding toxic people?

I highly recommend reading the Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. 

You’ll shock yourself by finding almost everyone you know in some form in the pages of the book - including yourself.

For those who don’t want to commit to 600+ pages, there’s a great concise edition also available.

1. Acta Non Verba.
2. 
   

The latin expression catpures it well: Deeds, not words. Or, Actions, not words.

Either way - the message is the same. The way forward isn’t through words, it’s through actions.

In fact, Law 9 of the 48 Laws of Power captures it in a simple way: Win through your actions, never through argument.

If you get entangled verbally with a vater, they’ll bring you back to the ground. They’ll fill your mind with doubt. They’ll dredge up past obstacles and mistakes. They’ll try to kill your progress in infancy. For them, it’s far easier to bring you down to the muck - rather than trying to raise themselves up.

As Charlie Munger said, “the world is not driven by greed: it’s driven by envy”. The envious want you to spend your energy arguing with them, they want to delay you, they want to persuade or coerce you to stay down.

You’ll never win this way. In fact, at best, you’ll aggravate an already bitter person. The best way to win is through your actions. Let your outcomes and your results be proof of your beliefs.

It’s also a great way to ensure that you’re living up to your own standards.

 I remember once giving someone a lift. We were discussing the best investments to make when you're young.. I said I believed self-investments have the highest potential for return. A $20 Book could give you an idea or teach you a skill that could change your life.

The person I was giving the lift to looked up and said: “Yeah but you’ve been doing that, and what do you have to show for it, huh?”

Now, after resisting the temptation to pull over and drop them off at the side of the road, I realised they were right. I was a believer in the power of gaining wisdom - but I had little to show for it. I wasn’t compounding knowledge well enough - and I certainly wasn’t turning words into works.

I didn’t respond to the comment, instead, I filed it away. I reminded myself that I needed to win through my actions. I’d let them live a life where they, in their own words, “hated books” and thought they were pointless. I’d focus on letting knowledge compound and putting that knowledge into action.

Acta non verba. Let’s let our deeds and actions do the talking. 

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As always, thank you for reading.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Let's beat haters and fear of failure together.

Until next week,

Zachariah