Fail From Effort, Not From Absence

This wasn’t even a long section of the book. Maybe a page, page and a half. But it’s the one that’s been circling my head the most since I read it.

Wiest makes a simple distinction: there’s failing from effort, and there’s failing from absence. One means you tried and it didn’t work out. The other means you never showed up at all.

And I think most of us know which one we default to more often than we’d like to admit.

The “What Ifs” Are Loud

I’ve noticed something about the moments right before I start something new. There’s this chorus of questions that shows up, uninvited, and takes over the whole room.

What if the app flops? What if I don’t get the gig? What if nobody reads the blog?

(Thanks for proving that last one wrong, by the way.)

These aren’t irrational fears. That’s the annoying part. They’re all plausible outcomes. The app might flop. You might not get the job. The blog post might land to an audience of exactly zero.

But here’s the question I’ve been sitting with: so what?

Or like we say where I’m from — ehen?

So what if the app flops? So what if you didn’t get the job? So what if nobody reads it? What matters is that you showed up. The outcome wasn’t guaranteed, but the attempt was yours.

Effort Moves You Forward. Absence Doesn’t Keep You Still.

I used to think not trying was a neutral position. Like, if I don’t start the project, I’m just… here. Same spot. No harm done. I’ll get to it when I’m ready, when the timing is right, when the conditions are perfect.

But that’s not how it works.

The world is moving forward, with or without you. While you’re frozen, everything around you keeps changing. Skills you don’t practice start to rust — I can think of a few I let go quiet over the years, things I was decent at once and would now have to relearn from scratch. Opportunities that were open close on their own schedule, not yours. And people who did start, even badly, are already learning things you won’t learn until you try.

I wrote in the last post about how I tend to let ideas and projects fade — start something, feel the energy, then drift. I framed that as a belief problem, a fear that following through might not amount to anything. And it is that. But reading this section of the book, I realized there’s another way to look at the same pattern: every time I let an idea go quiet instead of seeing it through, I wasn’t just avoiding failure. I was choosing the worse kind of failure. The kind that teaches you nothing.

Because failing from effort gives you something to work with. You learned where the idea broke, or where you broke. That’s the kind of failure you can actually use.

Failing from absence gives you nothing. No lessons. No data. Just the same “what ifs,” except now they’re joined by a new one: what if I had actually tried?

Failing in the Right Direction

There’s a phrase from John C. Maxwell that keeps coming back to me: fail forward. When you fall, fall in the direction you were heading. Let the failure carry you closer, not further away.

What Wiest adds to that, at least for me, is the connection to the beliefs underneath. The “what ifs” that keep you from starting? Those are the same self-sabotaging beliefs she talks about throughout the book — the ones that dress up as protection but really just keep you standing still. And standing still, as it turns out, isn’t standing still at all. It’s falling behind while feeling frozen.

Fear, left unchallenged, doesn’t get quieter. It gets more comfortable. It starts to feel like common sense. And that’s when it’s the most dangerous — when “I’ll wait until I’m ready” stops sounding like a delay and starts sounding like wisdom.

So the next time the “what ifs” line up, I have a follow-up question ready.

Ehen? So What?