How to Leave Past Failures Behind and Dare to Start Again

In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I look at how to stop being afraid to start again after a failure, and why a past failure in business, work, relationships or anything else does not yet mean that everything will repeat itself in the future. After a painful experience, people often begin to identify with their failure: the past becomes proof of their own inability, and the fear of making a mistake again keeps them from moving forward.

Why doesn't past experience guarantee the same result, how does examining causes differ from drawing superficial conclusions, and should life experience be divided into good and bad? The central question is not how to erase the past, but how you perceive your life, see the causes of what happens and relate to your own experience.

There is no pattern in life

– How do you separate yourself from past failures and, when launching something new, not look at the mistakes you made?

– Look, this question immediately raises a lot of questions for me. What is it you want to find out? Because, in essence, a person starts a discussion with themselves. They say, “There's so much I'd like to do, but I cut myself off from a great many additional opportunities because I'm afraid it might not work out. And yet I really want so much.” And they draw a certain conclusion for themselves. A false conclusion, I should note: that the problem is that, for some reason, they have mentally decided they don't want something.

I think I recently made a video where I posed this question: I probably could have done everything, I just didn't have the desire. I probably could have had a child, too; I just decided that we wouldn't have children. And we know a huge number of people in modern society who say, “We just don't want children right now.” And usually, in conversations with parents, the question comes up: “And when you do want them, do you think children will appear right away?” You wanted them, and children appeared right away?

Or do you think that people who have children specifically wanted children: drew up a plan, set a goal, wrote down, “I want a child”? Or that a person who has a business specifically built a plan and made a strategy according to their wishes? And that people who don't have a business simply didn't want to have one? Did people who got a very good education want to get it — or did it just turn out that way? And did those who didn't get a good education simply not want it? Or were there people who wanted it, but it didn't work out for them? Are people who are ill people who didn't want to be healthy and didn't look after their health? And people who aren't ill — did they want that or not?

We'll immediately see a huge, simply incredible number of situations in which there are no patterns of any kind. If you look at life globally, there is no pattern.

That's why this line of reasoning raises a very big question for me: I'm trying to get to the real construct — what is it the person wants to know? And I see that this question is invented, distorted from above by the person's own understanding — it's an ego construct, an ego system. The person invented it. They are in the wrong layer of understanding their reality altogether, and so they fall into a rather serious trap — endlessly chewing over the question: will it work out for me or not? Should I do this or not?

Where “it'll work out or it won't” comes from

A person's fear that something won't work out, based on past experience, can be compared exactly with the confidence that it will work out — also based on their own experience. Here you need to sort things out for yourself at a fundamental level. It's very important where this perception of “it'll work out or it won't” comes from.

It's born mentally, out of a construct of learnedness or a scientific view of how things happen: if I managed to earn a thousand rubles last year, or a thousand dollars the year before, then I'll be able to earn it this year too. And you check it precisely: you see that a thousand dollars came into your account, and you have the feeling that you'll definitely be able to repeat exactly that.

Or the feeling that it won't work out comes to you from something else: you see this future with your whole system, your whole spiritual system, and you understand that this won't happen again. That was the last time. And you know it with such certainty that, even if the whole mental and social space and the whole space of learnedness shows that you should act and that everything will work out, your inner angle of spiritual vision says: no, this won't happen again. And you go on doing it, relying on the social aspects of perception. And at some point there's a crisis in the country or in your life, or your arms get torn off, or something else happens, or you die — and you don't manage to do it.

This is a very important point: how a person perceives their experience, or the experience ahead, and what they base it on. A person says, “I managed to build a business,” and concludes, “So I'll manage to start a second business.” Or they call themselves a serial entrepreneur. But does your serial track record really have any cause-and-effect connection at all with whether you'll manage to launch the next business? Does such a connection really exist — or is it totally absent and nonexistent?

For example, I say to myself: right, I earned a thousand dollars here because I inherited five thousand dollars and put it into investments — an extra thousand came flying in. Or I earned a thousand dollars because an acquaintance came to me and gave me the right advice on how to invest and earn that thousand. Or I happened to meet some person on the street, and he — I don't understand how — offered me a job. I earned a thousand dollars. However much I tried to meet such people again, I never did.

People draw conclusions abstractly

By the way, this is one of the biggest problems of the social, present-day world — above all in everything that concerns small business. It's a very big story, when people draw conclusions abstractly instead of really working out why one thing or another happened, why it worked out for them or why it didn't.

There are such cases in the world, with startups, for example. People say: this person tried twenty-five businesses, they didn't work out, and the twenty-sixth did — he built a billion-dollar company. Everyone is told: you have to keep trying. But it's by no means certain that you have to keep trying. First, maybe you'll try fifteen times — you'll already be a hundred years old, and you'll die. You may not make it in time. Second, who told you it will work out for you the way it did for that person? After all, there are other people for whom it worked out the first time. And there are people who couldn't even try. And there are people who tried — and completely ruined their lives and became unhappy.

I know an incredible number of people with money who are very unhappy, and I know people without money who are very unhappy. It's not connected at all. And the saying “Happiness isn't in money, but in how much of it you have” absolutely doesn't work. There is no cause and effect.

What's more, you can have a good family, good children, good people around you, a good wife, a good husband, good parents, a good social environment, a good business — everything can run perfectly smoothly — and yet unhappiness will live inside you every morning.

Or you'll live in fear that it won't work out. Imagine: which is better — to be afraid that it won't work out, or to have no desire at all to do it? Someone will say, “Of course it's better to be afraid it won't work out,” — and will live in this system of constant achievement-chasing. That's by no means certain.

Because there are people who have neither fear nor desire. They live absolutely calmly. They do the job they were assigned and work in it for forty years. And then — boom, it turns out the company went public, and they have tens of millions of dollars. Do you know how many people like that there are in the world? There are already many — people who simply worked at a company. At Walmart, for example, there are sales clerks who are millionaires: when they started working as clerks, they received shares, and now they are millionaires — and they keep working as sales clerks. Nothing in their lives has changed.

And there are people who dreamed all their lives, wanted it all their lives — and it didn't work out for them. And they ruined their own lives and ruined the lives of everyone around them. And there are people who dreamed — and helped themselves and helped the people around them.

How you relate to old failures

So the notion of experience, of old lack of success, of old failures — the question is how you relate to it.

And you don't try to predict in advance that it is guaranteed never to happen to you again: fifteen of my flowers died, but the sixteenth won't. I raised three children, they turned out strange and don't talk to me, but now a fourth has come along — this one I'll really invest in, and he'll talk to me.

How do you perceive life? How do you see causes and effects? That matters most of all.

There is no such thing as success or failure in life

The very fact of failure says that you are living without knowledge of life. Because in life there is no such thing as success or failure, there is no experience you can call good or bad. There is simply experience.

Causes and effects, experience are needed as a given, not as good or bad. The point isn't in good or bad. Somewhere good ones are needed, somewhere bad ones. And both good and bad are your own sense of good and bad, not that of your spiritual structure. Let alone the spiritual world, and the whole world and the Universe in general. That is not their notion of good and bad at all.

You can't even figure yourself out. A person can't figure themselves out, can't simply lay out, see and analyze the causes and effects of ten years of their own life. So what can we say about the laws of the Universe, about interaction in the Universe with everything else? Otherwise a person starts putting themselves at the center of the Earth and building life around themselves. And primitively saying that everything should be arranged according to their understanding of what is good and bad for themselves.

But then you have forgotten about other people.

As soon as you forget about other people, you violate the laws of the Universe.

And where there are other people, there is no notion of good and bad for you. There is good and bad for the Universe, for all people — okay, keep that for yourself. But then your good may be bad for other people, and your bad may be good for them.

Strictly speaking, that's exactly what we see. Someone bought shares and made money, while on the other side, someone at that moment sold you those shares and lost money. How many such patterns are there? Simply an incredible, countless number. Someone wins and someone loses. It's somebody's money.

Say you went to a casino once and won. Whom did you win from? The casino? The casino just has its own profit on the side. You took some other person's money, that's all. It isn't the casino's money; it was never there to begin with. Because there's a very clear sequence: even if at some point you won, if you keep playing to the end, you'll have no money left and won't be able to play anymore. There's no person whose money, if they kept playing, would only grow endlessly. That formula always applies there. It means you received another person's money. You feel good — he feels bad.

That is exactly why we say that in the present world there are, at the same time, people who are being born and people who are dying. Right now, at this very moment, there are people who are suffering very seriously. And there are people who are very seriously rejoicing, smiling and happy.

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