Find your failure point and get to work

While I was in college playing football, I had a vision for my career. I recognized that athletes get trained physically 100:1 compared to how they get trained behaviorally. I also recognized that no profession gets less direct coaching than coaches.  I was going to teach behavior skills to athletes and leadership skills to coaches. The need seemed obvious. The value seemed undeniable. Success, it seemed to me, was inevitable.

I graduated and set out at 23 years old to bring this vision to life. One year later, I had no clients, no money, and no success. Not even one coach hired me. Not a single team let me work with their players. I had obviously, undeniably failed.

And why?

Because I wasn’t good enough.

If I were good enough, coaches would have hired me. If I were good enough, I would have been helping teams get better and my bank accounts wouldn’t be empty. But I wasn’t helping anyone and ATM’s were a constant reminder of that.

My vision was still clear. I never lost that. I just wasn’t good enough to make it real in the world. At least not yet.

Disappointed but not defeated, I studied, trained, worked, and improved. I developed my identity. I chose my standards. I built my skills. Steadily, year by year, trial by trial, lesson by lesson, I built myself into the person I wanted to be, the person who could actually make his vision real in the world.

10 years after my first failed attempt, an opportunity arose. But it was also a huge challenge: Urban Meyer wanted a meeting at Ohio State to learn how we help coaches, players, and teams.

One minute into the meeting, Urban stopped our discussion and said he was sold (I’m not exaggerating—one minute into the meeting). He committed himself and the Ohio State football program to our system of training behavior skills and developing leadership skills.

10 years earlier, I would have failed in that meeting. Even one year earlier, I still think I would have failed.

Over and over again I have stepped into challenges and failed at some crucial moment. But through those failures I have learned where I was not good enough. I have seen where I feel short and why I failed. But I’ve trained and trained and trained to win those moments the next time I faced them.

It is only because of that willingness to step into the challenge, fail, evaluate, learn, improve, and step into the challenge again that I have succeeded where I have previously failed.

You don’t take on challenges only when you know you will win. You take on challenges to see if you are good enough to win. The right challenges test your strength, your skill, your belief, and your will. The right challenges reveal your failure points.

Sometimes challenges exist not for you to overcome, but for you to fail. Because they show you where you need to grow and get better.

Event + Response = Outcome. Do the work.