The fear of failure often hinders people from living their lives to the fullest, leading to lost opportunities and potential. At 76, Arnold Schwarzenegger is way past this fear and wants his village to overcome this hurdle too.
He began a new series in his newsletter where he talked about fighting this feeling of apprehension, and he assigned some tasks to his readers to overcome it step by step. While the first activity simply focused on listing down the worst-case scenarios, this time, he took it up a notch higher.
In the new segment under ‘Monday Motivation,’ he continued overcoming the fear of failure with another task. Speaking of how sometimes people refrain from doing something due to their fear of embarrassing themselves, he wanted his village to understand how things weren’t as horrible as their minds led them to believe.
Unlike the main characters in movies, not every move is tracked by people who are ready to laugh at one’s failures. Instead, Schwarzenegger assured that most wouldn’t even bother to look, let alone make fun of setbacks and misses. In fact, he believed that everyone involved themselves in dealing with their own failures too much to pay attention to someone else’s.
“Sure, a few of them may enjoy some schadenfreude. A few might laugh at you. How does that hurt you? Why should you care about people who were rooting against you, anyway?”
As someone who witnessed countless people laugh at his accent and make fun of the way he spoke, nothing bothered Schwarzenegger anymore. He figured that the only way to help people overcome this fear was to encourage them to flaunt their failures out loud.
He instructed readers to pick any activity that took about 30 seconds to perform, record themselves doing it, and if they failed, post it on social media.
“I will absolutely guarantee you that fewer people will see it than you imagined when you were paralyzed by fear of embarrassment.”
There was a higher chance of people actually encouraging one through failure than making fun of it. This activity might just be the bridge to build a close community of people pushing each other to be better.
Arnold Schwarzenegger first began his series on overcoming failure by asking people to take notes
Before instructing people to record themselves failing and posting it on social media, Schwarzenegger focused on simply training the mind to accept failures. “To err is human“, and he took the saying to heart as he talked about it in detail in his previous newsletter.
His first task to his village was to imagine and note down all the worst outcomes they could think of upon failing to do a certain activity. Unless the outcome was something extreme like injuring oneself or getting into grave trouble, nothing should stop them from giving things a shot.
This combination of the state of mind change and the actions translates into a powerful tool for those who are still getting trapped in the cage of perfectionism and who dream of finding the path to self-creation no matter their age.
