Those that are strong do not “faint in the day of adversity” but rather purposefully fail when they are comfortable. When everything is going good, is when the strong will seek to test boundaries, push new limits and stretch their own personal capabilities. The person that is weak, often pretends, and when that adversity really comes they are unable to actually be strong and therefore faint. Fainting is not failure.
Failure is a deliberate outcome. We train to failure. We measure the point at which we fail and repeat the process of seeking the point at which failure is good. Failure is a paradigm that the successful find themselves not only in, but constantly seeking. The foolish person, the pretender, will avoid failure and be afraid of it. They view failure in a negative connotation and hide it from the view of others. Failure to them is an admission. To the strong, failure is a process.
Those that are strong, are in a constant state of failure. They fail frequently and often so that when the time comes to perform they do not faint. Those that are weak are constantly avoiding failure. They never fail and pretend they have success so that when the time comes to perform they faint. To put it simply, you can tell when you are in association with a strong person because when the going gets tough, or the time to perform is at hand, that person does not faint, withdrawal or make excuses. They are ready, willing, and capable of continuing the fight.
The weak are the first to quit, the first to find excuse. They cannot tolerate opposition or adversity. When the time comes when they must perform they are unable to do so, they faint, fall apart, and are unable to sustain any length of duration in adversity. Real training therefore is real effort under conditions that will cause you to fail. You absolutely must work to failure when you are preparing so that when you need to perform you do not faint.
This is brutally hard to do. This would be the separation between a real athlete and someone who only wants to be athletic. Real athletes are in training programs that induce frequent failure and recovery. People that want to be athletic, merely wear the clothes, hold the memberships, read the books, but in reality all their efforts always cut short, way before failure. Failing must get you to the point of being uncomfortable. Which means that when you are trying to prepare to be what you want to be, then you have to go through a lot of times when you push yourself to the point of failure, repeatedly. You must be uncomfortable to be successful.
So contrary to the mindset of almost everyone, failure is an option, it is the only option. Failure is the goal of your preparation. You seek to fail, want to fail, and work continuously until you do fail. When you fail, you learn, you grow, you improve. During recovery you reflect on what went wrong so that you can improve, and improve you will. It is fainting when you need to perform that you are actually trying to avoid. Fainting during adversity is what any plan of self improvement should be trying to avoid, not failure.
When should you push to failure? When you are comfortable, when you should be training. So stop being comfortable and start failing so that you will not faint when it counts. Whether your ambition is to be an athlete, investor, artist, or inventor you must adopt a program of failure during times of comfort so that when you need to perform you do not faint.
Guy Reams (1079)
