How to Keep Past Failures Out of a New Venture and Find the Courage to Start Again

OSOlga Stolyarova

How do you separate yourself from past failures and start something new without looking back at the mistakes you made?

AVAlexander Volchek

That question immediately raises many questions for me. What do you want to find out? Essentially, a person starts a discussion with themselves: “There is so much I want to do, but I cut myself off from many additional opportunities because I am afraid it might not work out. Yet I want so much.” They reach a conclusion—a false one, I should point out—that the problem lies in having mentally decided, for some reason, that they do not want something. I think I recently made a video about this: “I could probably do anything; I just did not have the desire. I could probably have had a child; I just decided we would not have children.” A great many people in society today say, “We just do not want children right now.” In conversations with parents, the question usually comes up: “When you do want them, do you think children will appear immediately? You want them, and there they are?”

Or do you think everyone who has children specifically wanted them, made a plan, set a goal, and wrote, “I want a child”? Did someone who has a business devise a plan and strategy out of their desire for one? Do people without a business lack one because they did not want one? Did people with a very good education want it, or did things turn out that way? Did those without a good education simply not want one? Or were there people who wanted it but could not get it? People who are ill—are they people who did not want to be ill, who did not look after their health? And people who are not ill: did they want that, or not? We immediately see an enormous number of situations without any consistent pattern. Looking at life as a whole, there is no such pattern. That is why this line of reasoning raises a big question for me: I am trying to get to the real structure of what the person wants to know. The question seems invented, distorted by their own understanding, a construct or system of ego.

The person has invented the question. They are not at the level of understanding their own reality where they need to be, and they fall into a serious trap, endlessly chewing over whether it will work out and whether they should do it. Olya, you can ask a follow-up here. A person's fear that something will not work out, based on past experience, can be compared directly with confidence that it will, also based on experience. We need to examine this fundamentally: where does that sense of “It will work” or “It will not” come from? Does it arise mentally from a framework of learned or scientific ideas about how things happen? “If I earned forty dollars last year, or a thousand dollars the year before, I can earn it this year.” You compare the results: a thousand dollars came into your account, so you feel you can repeat it. Or does the sense that it will not work come from something else? Perhaps you see the future with your whole system, your entire spiritual system, and understand that it will not happen again.

That was the last time. You know it with such certainty that even if the whole mental, social, and learned world tells you to act because you will succeed, your inner spiritual perspective says, “No, this will not happen again.” You carry on anyway, based on social ways of perceiving things. Then a crisis hits your country or your own life, your arms are torn off, something else happens, or you die, and you cannot do it. This is important: how do people perceive their experience or the experience ahead, and what do they base it on? Someone says, “I managed to build a business,” and concludes, “So I can start a second one.” Or they call themselves a serial entrepreneur. But does that track record actually have any causal connection with whether they can start the next business? Does such a connection exist, or is it entirely absent? When I ask myself whether I can earn a thousand dollars this year because I earned it last year, I examine the various causes and effects that made it possible, rather than looking abstractly at the final result.

For example: “I earned a thousand dollars here because I inherited five thousand and invested it. That brought in an extra thousand.” Or a friend came and gave me the right advice about how to invest and earn that thousand dollars. Or I met a stranger on the street who somehow offered me a job, and I earned a thousand dollars. However much I tried, I never met another person like that. This is one of the enormous problems of today's social world, particularly in small business. People draw abstract conclusions instead of genuinely understanding why something happened, why they succeeded or failed. There are startup stories like this: someone tried twenty-five businesses unsuccessfully, succeeded with the twenty-sixth, and built a billion-dollar company. Everyone is told to keep trying, but it is by no means certain that you should. First, perhaps you will try fifteen times, be a hundred years old, and die.

You may run out of time. Second, who told you it would work out for you? Some people succeed on their first attempt. Some never even get the chance to try. Others try and ruin their entire lives, becoming unhappy. I know an incredible number of very unhappy people with money, and very unhappy people without it. There is no connection at all. The saying “Happiness is not about money, but how much of it you have” does not work. It absolutely does not. There is no cause-and-effect relationship. You can have a good family, children, people around you, a good wife or husband, parents, a good social environment and business, with everything going smoothly, and still wake up with unhappiness living inside you every morning. Or live in fear that you will fail. So which is better: fear that it will not work out, or no desire to do it at all? Someone will say, “Of course it is better to be afraid of failure,” and live in that system of endlessly pursuing achievement.

Not necessarily. Some people have neither fear nor desire. They simply live peacefully. They do the job they were assigned and stay in it for forty years. Then the company goes public, and suddenly they are worth tens of millions of dollars. Do you know how many people like that there are? There are already many who simply worked for a company. Walmart has sales associates who are millionaires because they received shares when they started working there. They are millionaires and still work as sales associates. Nothing in their lives has changed. Others dreamed and wanted something all their lives, failed, and ruined their own lives and those of everyone around them. Still others dreamed and helped themselves and the people around them. So how do you relate to experience, to old failures? Do you see them as part of life, as events in life, without denying them or denying that they could happen again?

Without trying to predict in advance, “I guarantee this will never happen to me again. Fifteen plants died, but the sixteenth will not. I raised three children who turned out strange and do not speak to me. Now a fourth has arrived. I will invest in this one, and they will speak to me.” How do you perceive life? How do you see causes and effects? That matters most. The very fact of failure indicates—

That you are living without understanding life. In life, there is no concept of success or failure, no experience that can be called good or bad. There is simply experience. Where there are experience and causes and effects, there is no concept of bad or good. Causes and effects, experiences, are needed as things in themselves, not as good or bad. Their point is not being good or bad. Sometimes good ones are needed, sometimes bad ones. And good and bad are your sense of good and bad, not that of your spiritual structure, let alone the spiritual world, the whole world, or the Universe. Those are not its definitions of good and bad. You cannot even understand yourself, trace the causes and effects of ten years of your own life, see and analyze them. What can we then say about the laws of the Universe and its interactions with everything else? Otherwise, people place themselves at the center of the Earth and build life around themselves, simplistically insisting that everything should be arranged according to their own understanding of good and bad for themselves.

But then you have forgotten other people. As soon as you do that, you violate the laws of the Universe. Where other people are involved, there is no concept of good and bad for you alone. Good and bad for the Universe, for all people—fine, keep that idea. But what is good for you may be bad for others, and what is bad for you may be good for them. We see it: someone bought shares and made money, while someone else sold those shares and lost money. There are countless such patterns. Someone wins and someone loses; it is someone's money. Suppose you go to a casino once and win. Whose money did you win? The casino's? The casino takes its profit on the side. You took another person's money. It was not the casino's to begin with. There is a clear pattern: if you play ten times and keep on playing, even if you win at some point, you will have no money left.

If you keep playing to the end, you will have no money left. Play continuously and you will run out and be unable to keep playing. There is no one whose money would increase endlessly by continuing to play. That is the formula at work. It means you received someone else's money. You feel good; they feel bad. That is why we say people are being born and dying simultaneously in the world. Right now, some people are suffering terribly, while others are profoundly joyful, smiling, and happy.