How to minimise fear of failure and kill bad habits by using substitution rather than trying to appreciate a void.

We’ve all heard the advice ‘fail fast,’ but how many of us actually take it?

Failure sucks. It hurts to get your hopes up about something you want and then watch it disappear before your eyes. That’s because humans have a very hard time placing value on a void.

We like things. We’re hard wired from our hunter gatherer days to accumulate.

It’s also why giving up bad habits feels impossible when we solely focus on cutting them out. All we end up doing is thinking about the thing we’re missing, which leads us to want it even more.

So forget focusing on giving things up, and forget trying to value failure.

It’s not going to work.

Instead, focus on a related outcome that you can feel good about achieving.

Want to give up drinking alcohol? Start a blog or podcast about your journey searching for the best non-alcoholic drinks out there. Even if you never share it with anyone, your brain will reward you each time you make a positive step towards your new goal rather than punishing you for desiring something you can’t have.

Want to detach yourself from being stressed about the outcome of projects you’re working on? Reward yourself for every post match review you are able to conduct rather than that output of each project.

The post match review, where you break down what worked and what didn’t, can only be conducted after an experiment has finished.

It encourages you to fail fast by design and doesn’t require you to value a loss.

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