One of my favorite stories about success is actually one about failure. Someone asked IBM driving visionary Thomas Watson what would be his number 1 piece of advice for becoming a success. His answer: Double your rate of failure. This gets to the essense of my training beliefs working with my pro racer clients. In any training program for car racers or motorcycle racers, be very leary of a regimen that doesn’t ask you to do things that are uncomfortable and cause you to fail, at least initially.
The reason is that with working out, any job skill, or anything worth doing, failure is indispensable to the learning process.  Every activity that we seek to be great at is so nuanced and has so many minor parts, that it is impossible to be the master of it the first time out. You will notice that if you live with the reality that mistakes and adjustments are part of the learning process, your enthusiasm for the work will increase. I have never known anybody who is a success, not Joey Saldana, not Kasey Kahne, who didn’t hold great enthusiasm for their work.
So I work with my clients and I tell them to work to the edge of failure and don’t worry about an exercise being uncomfortable. To actually seek the discomfort and defeat by the exercise. For athletes who compete at an elite level, this is an easy concept for them to get Simply put, they pursued their dreams with total abandon from an early age and are accustomed to not winning the first time out. They are even accustomed to looking foolish at times.
To not fail, is to fail. To take mistakes personally and let your ego get in the way of your march to success is a fruitless approach. Actually, this is one of the easiest lessons of Brian’s 7 laws to grasp. Making this slight adjustment will set you on fire almost immediately. Suddenly, the world becomes a place where you can do anything if you realize anything worth doing is, is worth doing poorly at first.
Russ Bohaty, The Racers Trainer, is the Personal Fitness Trainer for NASCAR’s Kasey Kahne and The Kasey Kahne Racing Team. His Free 6-Week Mental Fitness program geared toward your peak performance is available at www.racerstrainer.com.
