13 Great Advice How To Not Fail in Life

Here’s a quick question: Can you really NOT fail in life?

Can you really avoid making mistakes and not going through any failures in whatever you do in life?

The answer is a no. We all know that.

But let’s face it, nobody likes to fail in life.

Regardless of whether it is in your personal life or professional life, we all hate to fail.

The problem is that failure is inevitable. As long as you are making progress and taking action, you can’t not fail.

That means failure is part of the process. And there is no way you can avoid it.

The only thing that matters is how you deal with failure and what you should do to learn as much and as fast as possible so that you can avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

You want to make sure you become wiser and smarter from your previous experience.

I like how Tony Robbins puts it:

“Success in life is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is usually the result of experience. Experience is usually the result of bad judgment.”

Tony Robbins

As much as we hate failures, we can’t avoid them.

Mistakes and failures play an important role in shaping who we are and of course, in guiding us to the right path or place.

Steve Jobs started Apple but he was fired from the very company that he started in 1985. But that event led him to build another company called NeXT company which was acquired by Apple a few years later. Jobs went back to Apple and you know the rest of the story.

Bill Gates started a company called Traf-O-Data that analyzed and process traffic data, but the product failed. Gates then learned the lesson and begin working on another project, which eventually led him to create his first Microsoft product. And the rest becomes history.

As you can now tell, failure may not be a bad thing in life.

But, is there a way where you can learn to avoid or making less failures?

Can you learn the lesson and acquire better experience without going through failures?

Here are 13 practical advice how not to fail in life…

1. Strive to Become Better

One of the keys to success is to consistently strive to do better and to improve yourself every day. So let me ask you, do you read or practice to improve your skill each day?

If you don’t, sooner or later, someone with better knowledge or skills will overtake you. The competition is tough these days. Anyone can read a book, learn what you do, and do it much better than you.

You have to consistently improve yourself.

Set aside at least 30 minutes a day to read books. Constantly upgrade your knowledge and improve your skills, and be innovative.

Imagine if you read a book in a month, within a year, you will have read 12 books. And if each book gives you an idea of how to do better, you will have 12 new ideas in a year.

Do you know how impactful this can be to your life?

Successful people are readers. They constantly read to improve their knowledge and keep themselves updated from time to time.

You have to do the same if you want to achieve amazing success and not fail in life.

Read: Why Do You Need to Read Books and the Benefits of It

2. Work on Your Health and Fitness

Your goal is not to be the richest person in the graveyard, so make sure your health is your number one priority.

There is no point in having all the wealth in the world but you have no health to enjoy it.

When you are healthy, you will have more energy. And when you have the energy, you can accomplish more and do better in life. And of course, to avoid making mistakes and failures.

Most people don’t really care about their health until it is too late.

Never let this happen to you. Spend time exercising every day. Eat better foods and get rid of smoking and drink less often.

Success is really about maintaining a good health level.

Do you know that most successful people spend their morning time exercising?

In one of my favorite books, What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, the author, Laura Vanderkam shared that one big common morning habit of extremely successful people is – exercise.

If you don’t have the health and the energy to pursue a better life, you become the ultimate failure.

Don’t let that happen to you. Make it your daily habit to exercise and to maintain a good health level.

When you are healthy, you will automatically become more productive, motivated, and able to accomplish more, and avoid making mistakes.

3. Spend Time With The Right People

Jim Rohn once said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” And he is absolutely right.

You become who you spend the most time with. If you mix around with losers, you will end up a loser. If you want to fly with the eagle, you have to stop swimming with the ducks.

What do you think will happen if a professional tennis player trains and practices with a complete beginner? Do you think the professional tennis player will improve and become better? Or do you think his skill will deteriorate?

You know the answer, it is obvious.

You can only become better when you mix with people who are equally good or doing much better than you.

When you join a group of entrepreneurs, your conversation will be around businesses. But when you join a group of unsuccessful people who are negative, most of the time, you guys will be talking about things that are not important.

“Great people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. And small people talk about other people.”

It is time to seriously do some housekeeping and decide who you want to spend the most time with.

Do you want to spend time with other successful people who are doing much better than you? Or do you want to stay the same and spend your time with people who always complain and talk about other people?

The choice is yours.

Read: Why You Should Hang Out with Successful People

4. Keep Making Progress and Take Action

Success requires taking consistent action. If you don’t keep moving forward, you will never get the results you want, period.

And if you don’t take action, guess what, you will never reach your goals and accomplish great things in life.

And that means you will become a failure. So, to not fail in life, you must continue to make progress and keep taking action.

Now, you don’t have to spend 20 hours working on your goals each day.

All you need to do is have the patience and take consistent action.

Just like the Rule of Five suggests, you just need to work on 5 little things that will move you forward every day.

And these small victories will accumulate and bring you huge success in life.

It is what you do every day that matters, not what you do once in a blue moon. Success takes time and it is not going to happen overnight.

Michael Jordan was just a rookie like everybody else when he first started to play basketball. But he practiced every day and kept moving forward. He was once a beginner, but eventually, he became the master.

You can be the same too.

You may be just a beginner in what you do right now, but if you are willing to do the work, practice, improve and take action consistently, somehow you will become good at it and become a master too.

So, keep moving forward and keep taking action.

Read: Why Start Small? The 5 Important Benefits of Starting Small

5. Commitment And Determination

If you want to NOT fail in life, you need to have the commitment and determination to keep moving forward.

When you pursue something and you fail, does that make you a failure?

The answer is it depends.

If you choose to give up and quit, then yes, that event becomes a failure.

But if you don’t give up and continue to pursue it and keep working on it, then no, you are not a failure. You are still on you way and making progress to reach the success you desire.

Another thing is that you have to have the commitment to endure what is difficult.

Muhammad Ali has a great quote:

“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’”

Muhammad Ali

Most ordinary people are all about their feelings. They don’t like waking up early in the morning. Let’s be honest, who does?

However, it is the commitment to wake up and the determination to do the hard work that separates the successful and the unsuccessful.

Hence, stop letting your emotions control you.

Instead, choose to control your feelings and emotions. Do it and take action even when you don’t feel like doing it.

Choose to practice self-discipline instead of letting your feelings take control of your life.

6. Go The Extra Mile

Always exceed expectations and over deliver.

Most people don’t do this anymore. When you walk into your local store to buy a pizza, that’s all you get and nothing more. People just don’t do more than expected and over-deliver.

You get what you expect. Now, imagine what would happen if you over-deliver and do more than what is expected?

You create more value. People will remember you. You will become the first choice when people think about your product or service.

This is the secret to how you can win the competition and capture the market. You deliver more than what your customers expect of you.

When you do that, you automatically create more value, set the bar higher, and more importantly, you distinguish yourself from the rest, you become unique and special, and you will become extra-ordinary.

Do you know that the difference between ordinary and extraordinary is the word ‘extra’?

Thus, deliver more than what people expect of you.

• When your boss asks you to do the market research, over-deliver your work with a thorough report.
• When you are required to do exercise for 30 minutes, do more. Go for 45 minutes instead of just 30.
• When you need to write an article, over-deliver with valuable information that people love to read. Go in-depth and give more.

And that is the surest way to avoid failure and to create success.

7. Be Consistent With What You Do

When it comes to success, a lot of people often link it with bold decision and big move. They thought that success is achieved through taking the leap of faith.

While this is true, but how did the opportunity come around?

It is because successful people have been consistently working at what they want each day, and eventually, one day, the opportunity presented itself and they snatch it.

If you just sit and do nothing, opportunity or the big break will never come to you. If you want to win the lottery, you have to buy the tickets often enough to increase your chances of winning, agree? (Hey, I’m not suggesting you buy the lottery, okay?)

The same if you want to achieve great success in life. You have to be consistent and work on the small things so that the small victories will accumulate and become a big success one day.

Unfortunately, most people don’t have the willpower and discipline to stay consistent. They work on their goals for a few days, and when they don’t get the results they desire, they started to doubt themselves and switch to another project.

Success requires years of sustained effort to achieve.

If you don’t have the self-discipline to stay consistent in your work, most likely, you will never be able to produce the amazing result you want in life.

People just don’t become extraordinary and successful overnight. They become great and the master in what they do after pouring years of deliberate effort.

• Michael Phelps does not practice just for a day to become the Olympian swimmer that broke most records.
• It took James Dyson 5,127 prototypes before he finally came up with a bagless vacuum cleaning machine.
• Howard Schultz was turned down by 217 investors he talked to in his journey to expand Starbucks into a worldwide coffee phenomenon.

So, to not fail in life, you have to be consistent with what you do.

Read: 10 Amazing Methods How to Be Consistent in Achieving Your Goals

8. Plan And Visualize

If you do not want to fail in life, you must plan and visualize what you want each day. Why? The reason is simple – you want to create the intention so that you can align your life towards your goals and your dreams.

Larry Winget nails it when he said:

“No one ever wrote down a plan to be fat, broke, stupid, lazy, unhappy, and mediocre. Those are the things that happen to you when you don’t have a plan.”

Larry Winget

When you don’t have any clear and specific goal to achieve in life, you will live life as it is. You will become reactive and react to whatever comes to you.

Conversely, when you know what you want to do with your life, you will be more proactive. You will be the one to act instead of waiting for things to come to you.

When you have nothing to do over the weekend, how would you feel and how would your day end up?

Well, you will feel bored. And most likely you will sleep more and wake up late, waste time watching TV, checking updates on social media, and surfing the internet, and wasting your day.

Things will be totally different if you have plans and you know what to do.

This is the power of intention. When you hold the intention in your head, you increase your chances of making it happen.

This is why having a clear vision and planning for it are important.

Having a plan is better than no plan at all.

While it is true that we cannot predict the future, but when we have a plan, we can better map out the life that we want.

Therefore, if you don’t want to fail in life, you have to start planning for success right now.

Read: 10 Tips How to Plan Your Day and Live a More Successful Life

9. Practice Laser-Focus

If there is a skill that can help you avoid failures, it is this one.

You must learn how to focus your energy on doing the most important task that will give you the most result in life.

Every one of us has 24 hours a day, it is how we spend our time that determines what results we get in life.

Successful people spend most of their time on tasks that will give them 80% of the results.

On the other hand, unsuccessful people spend most of their time working on things that give them 20% results.

Practice the Pareto 80/20 Principle. Do what matters most. Focus your energy on doing work that will give you the most result.

Use the Time Block Method to focus on high-impact tasks.

Block your time to work on your goals. When you have blocked your time, concentrate on doing the task and don’t get distracted.

You will accomplish more when you choose to focus on the task that matters.

10. Bounce Back From Your Failure

• Pandora was rejected 300 times before they secured funding from investors.
• Colonel Sanders was rejected 1,009 times until someone said yes to his KFC recipe.
• Thomas Edison failed more than 10,000 times and he finally invented the light bulb.

Success only goes to people who are willing to bounce back and learn from their failures.

You have to treat your failures as feedback. You will definitely fail in your journey to success. Every successful person failed at some point.

As I said in the beginning of this guide, it is not about NOT avoiding failure completely, it is about learning and bouncing back as quickly as possible.

Failures are inevitable. And you want to pivot on your failures to bounce back higher.

Do you know that Soichiro Honda’s factory was leveled by the earthquake and his contract with Toyota went void due to war?

When the war broke out, there was insufficient fuel and nobody cared about driving a car. Instead, Honda got the idea and modified the piston rings, and placed it on a bike.

That was how Honda created the first motorbike in Japan. The concept became so popular that Honda rose to become a household name.

This is why you have to learn how to treat your failure as feedback and then bounce back from there.

When you do something and you are not getting the result you want, you either try again or you simply change your approach and then do it again.

Sadly, most people don’t do it this way. When they try something and they don’t get the result they want, they choose to complain and say that things just don’t work. And then they give up.

When a baby tries to walk, he will fall many times.

Will the parents stop the baby from trying? Not at all.

In fact, parents encourage the baby to walk and some even show the baby the right way to do it. No wonder everyone walks on this planet.

You just have to keep on trying until you get the result you want. Or better yet, change your strategy and then try it again.

Read: 7 Powerful Steps How to Overcome Failure in Life and Bounce Back

11. Enjoy And Make It Fun

You don’t want to work hard all your life and ended up you don’t enjoy the things you do, right? That’s ultimate failure.

So make it fun, develop your passion and more importantly, enjoy the journey.

You are going to go through life no matter how, so just choose to have fun with it. You don’t have to be overly serious all the time. There are times when you can have fun and enjoy the moment.

Johnny Depp has a quote, he said, “I think the thing to do is enjoy the ride while you’re on it.”

Yes, you are going to go through life somehow, so why don’t choose to enjoy the journey?

Live your life with passion and love. Inject the fun and develop passion in your work.

When you are passionate, you will do it even when it is tough.

Passion is considered one of the most important keys to success because when you love what you do, you will do it better and when the tough times come, you will continue to march on because you love doing it.

It is just like what Steve Jobs has to say:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Steve Jobs

12. Recharge Yourself

You have to take rests and recharge yourself from time to time. Do you know that extraordinary people like Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, John D. Rockefeller, etc., took naps during the day?

These people know that if they wanted to produce an amazing result in life, they must maintain their energy level. And thus, they took naps.

Studies have shown that people who take power naps in the day are more productive. After the short nap, you will feel awake and refresh. And this allows you to better concentrate on your work at hand.

So, recharge yourself. Go for holidays and travel overseas from time to time. Get close to nature and try to have time to stay in solitude.

Our energy level is like our phone’s battery. It is at the fullest when we first started early in the day. As we go through our day, we used our energy to do our work and to think.

This is why by the end of the day, sometimes in the afternoon, we feel tired and sleepy. When this happens, it is hard for us to focus and our willpower wanes.

Do you know why taking rest is important now?

If you want to not fail in life, constantly recharge yourself. Keep yourself motivated, productive, and at the peak state.

Read: The Importance of Taking a Short Break According to Research

13. Adopt The “Never Say Die” Attitude

The last tip that I would like to share with you so that you will fail less is to develop the ‘never say die’ attitude.

No matter what happened to extraordinary people, they seem to believe that things will turn out alright and they simply just don’t quit.

After Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, he took a few months off. And during that time, he discovered that he still loved doing what he did back then in Apple.

And therefore, he restarted his life and went on to build another company called NeXT Computer and bought Pixar. And the rest became history.

Successful people don’t quit when they face adversities and tough times. They choose to go on and believe that there is always a way to deal with the problems.

And they did. When there is a will, there is a way.

When Anthony Robbins’ company was in debt many years ago, everyone was talking about bankruptcy and what company they should go to after they got retrentched. However, Tony Robbins did not think that way.

Tony believed that as long as he is committed, he will find a way to go through the tough situation he was facing. And he did.

So, don’t quit. A winner will never quit and a quitter will never win.

“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”

Michael Jordan

Whatever you do, don’t give up and keep looking for ways to overcome the obstacles you faced in life.

Search for answers, ask for help, check on Google, and ask someone who has overcome the problem before.

As long as you don’t quit and keep trying, you stand a chance to win.

And here’s an advice from Maya Angelou:

“You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated.”

Maya Angelou

You can fall down many times, but that doesn’t mean you should accept it as a fact and continue to stay there.

You have a choice.

You can choose to stay there, or you can choose to dust yourself off and get back up again.

When you choose to get up again, that’s when you choose NOT to fail.

Read: 7 Things You Should Do When You Fail to Achieve Your Goals

Conclusion

Failure is common. Failure is inevitable.

But if you follow these 13 pieces of advice I shared above, you can minimize your failure and if you fail, you can learn the experience and bounce back quickly.

I hope this guide will inspire you to pursue your dreams and continue to work on the success you want to have in your life.

And when you encounter difficulties, challenges, and setbacks in your journey, which you will, just remind yourself that failures are not all that bad.

Do you like my advice? Let me know in the common below.