What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word, “failure”? If you’re like most people, it’s probably other words that carry extremely negative connotations. Defeat, disappointment, losing – things that make us feel inadequate or deficient in the eyes of the world and as a result, our own eyes. But what if you could train your brain to feel indifferent towards failure? To recognize it for what it truly is – something that is neither good nor bad by itself. Experiencing failure is necessary for us to gather data so that the next time we attempt something, we do it with a better, more informed approach. We try again and do it slightly better, but if our goals are worthwhile ones – then we’ll most likely fail again. You repeat that process over and over again knowing that each time you analyze what went wrong or what could have been done better, you get to regroup and come at it again with a different and improved strategy. When you take the time to examine yourself, your shortcomings, and your process – it enables you to seek new opportunities with confidence that the next try will be a success because of what your prior failures have taught you. In that way, the act of failing has an important purpose. Each failure, viewed through the proper lens, contains a lesson that gives you another piece of the puzzle you need to assemble your ideal life. This hopefully leads you to the goals you envisioned, but if not, it is guaranteed to lead you to other alternatives that will still leave you better off than when you began your journey towards achievement. Failure is an inextricable component of progress – and continuous progress is the whole game. Therefore, fearing failure is not only wholly irrational, but it is also holding you back from moving your life in the right direction.

I happen to think a lot of people end up settling into a level of comfort with their lives and never trying to achieve what they really want because of their fear of failure. People love to mask that fear with the guise of “practicality” or “realistic expectations.” But if we really dig a little bit below the surface, most people don’t push themselves towards their dreams because there’s always uncertainty, and uncertainty leads to doubt. They doubt their ability to succeed in the undertaking and the idea of putting 110% of their effort into something and having it not work out scares the shit out of them. As a result, most people end up living a life that requires 50% of their best effort but that offers them what they consider a safe place to be. Nothing glamorous, but enough – and that’s fine. The only time I think it’s not fine is if you’re suffering through the monotony of life not enjoying what you do every day. If your intuition is really sending you constant signals that you’re not where you’re meant to be – or that life could be so much better and that there is so much more out there waiting for you – then it’s a problem to settle for less than pursuing that possibility. You’re going to die one day and win or lose, succeed or fail… you’ll be happy later on that you had the courage and audacity to try. Unfortunately, people often sully their childhood dreams for a paycheck. As life goes on, responsibilities pile up and it becomes a necessity to establish financial security for themselves and their families. That’s why it’s particularly important for younger people to recognize how important it is to try new things and allow themselves to fail as much as possible without giving a fuck. The beauty here is that you are capable of redefining failure for yourself the same way you redefine success. Find the courage to tell society to take its idea of what your life should look like and shove it – and never let your decisions or actions be dictated by other people’s opinions of you.

When I think back to my younger self, I have a lot of regrets, but my biggest one is confidently that I didn’t let myself fail enough. I was always very self-conscious – I cared way too much about how I looked and what people would think of me. It stopped me from giving new things an earnest chance and who knows what kind of memorable life experiences I missed out on because of that. I’m fortunate to have fallen into a situation early in my life that put me in the driver’s seat of my destiny. I’m also fortunate that at 25 years old I was smart enough to see it that way and really sink my teeth into it. But when I go over what it took to get to this point in my life, I realize that it was a never-ending series of failures that paved the way to this moment. No matter how bruised my ego was or how low I felt about all my failed attempts to start making a life for myself or trying to be successful out in the world, I eventually healed enough to gain the courage to go and do it again. If you’re reading this blog right now, this is a perfect example of me going for it without being concerned with the outcome. Your relationship with, and perspective of, failure, will permeate every aspect of your life. If it’s a relationship and perspective characterized by fear, you won’t be able to make a move on anything you want to do. You will remain frozen in a state of inaction. If it’s one of indifference or the acceptance of failure as a vital part of success, you will free yourself up to take your shots in life – and some of them will eventually hit the mark. I want to walk you through how failing repeatedly created the path forward for me in my own life.

A little over seven years ago I was living in a one-bedroom apartment with two of my friends in Boulder, Colorado. I worked as a dishwasher and a fry cook for $10.50 an hour and slept on a couch that we got for free on Craigslist that multiple people had vomited on during house parties. The neighborhood squirrels found a way in and out of the apartment so I would frequently be woken up by the sound of a frantically panting tree mouse scurrying around the living room. One of my roommates worked as a line cook at the same restaurant I did and lived in a crawl space under the stairs like Harry Potter. It was a mess. After my stint in the restaurant biz, I went back to my roots in manual labor as a landscaper and mover. As I write this, I am overwhelmed with gratitude that in order to live I no longer have to push wheelbarrows full of rocks up steep inclines in sweltering heat or carry refrigerators down six flights of narrow stairs. I’m going to resolve not to complain about anything work-related from this point forward. Anyway, the whole reason I lived like this for a year was because I took a chance and dropped out of college to move to Colorado where I was absolutely certain my future was going to unfold as a successful marijuana grower and that I would become known as the “King of Cannabis” – it’s okay, you can laugh. It was goofy.

When I turned 21, I immediately got my paperwork done to work in the recreational cannabis industry. I was over the moon excited, beaming with optimism, and super fucking naïve about what was waiting for me. In no way is my personal experience with the industry indicative of all experiences (or even most) working in it or reflective of the industry as a whole. I still fully support the industry and have met wonderful people through pursuing that career path – but there’s a lot of bullshit too. With no prior experience, I ended up encountering the same issues I had in any other line of work I applied for as a college drop-out with no real discernible skills to speak of. I was offered $10-$15 an hour to sit in a chair for 8 to 10 hours a day and trim weed. So, it ended up sucking just as bad – and quite honestly even worse – than the other jobs I had been working. The only difference was that I got to hold, and smell weed all day… and I cannot tell you how quickly the novelty of that wore off. I wanted a shot to prove myself and after gritting my teeth through three months of working menial jobs for numerous dispensaries – no one seemed interested in giving me one. In true 2015 Nicholas fashion, my impatience led me to going a more unconventional route.

I ended up working for a large grow operation in the southern part of Colorado. I got hands-on experience with growing the plants and was able to learn first-hand the entire process that goes into producing cannabis for wholesale. There was only one catch… it wasn’t exactly legal. It started off great and I was trying to ingratiate myself with the crew and do my part to bring value to the operation as much as possible. I even got the chance to be fully responsible for 16 plants of my own from start to finish in the outdoor season to see what I could do. The problem was that I was young and stupid and broke. Growing cannabis properly costs a considerable amount of money, and I didn’t have enough to cover the resources I needed (soil, pots, nutrients, materials for a greenhouse, etc.) for the growing season. I ended up making a deal that was terrible for me just so I could get a solo grow under my belt and after all the sweat and months of demanding work I put into my plants, when I had to give up what I owed – I realized I had been taken advantage of. I got screwed. It wasn’t nefariously done per se, but they used my lack of experience and knowledge against me, and I paid the price for it. It really fractured my trust with the group of people I was involved with, and I wasn’t emotionally capable of looking at it the way I do now. At the time, I was pissed off and was confronted with making $10 an hour again and not being able to pay my bills or moving back to the East Coast to cool off and collect myself and try something new. I ended up choosing the latter. Now, after reflecting on the whole situation in hindsight, I realize that was my first crash course in the art of negotiation – and I failed badly at it. That has turned out to be one of the best lessons I have ever learned.

When I got back to New York I felt defeated. I was despondent to the point that I really thought my whole existence was defined by moving out to Colorado and having my dreams trounced and ending up back near my hometown in upstate New York looking for work. I felt like a complete and total failure – and I really believed life was never going to get better again. I split wood outside in the middle of winter and worked as a farm hand literally shoveling shit for a living. I was sleeping on a different couch, this one in my grandparent’s basement, and waking up at 5am every day to work tough jobs just so I could make enough to afford gas, cigarettes, and booze. I was physically exhausting myself and getting nowhere at the same time. When they say life is a series of ups and downs – I was halfway to China at this point.

The following spring, I had the opportunity to move to New York City. I really didn’t think of myself as a city person, and the proposition seemed daunting – but when I looked around me and observed my life in its present form – it made the decision pretty easy for me. What the hell did I have to lose? It turns out that that decision ended up being one of the best I ever made… and it still took about half a decade for the ROI from it to materialize. I absolutely loved NYC (particularly my neighborhood on the Upper West Side), I got to reconnect with several of my closest childhood friends who were also living there, and it ended up leading me to the job opportunity that has evolved into a total transformation of my professional and financial circumstances. But it was a grind to get there. When I first got to the city, I was still broke as shit. Being broke anywhere is tough – being broke in Manhattan is torture.

I went all over the city turning in resumés hoping to get a shot to bartend because I knew the pay was relatively good and I knew there were other perks to the lifestyle that I was still interested in at the time. I don’t drink anymore, but when I first got to NYC, I was like a kid in a candy shop… or an alcoholic in a sea of endless bars, clubs, and taverns. I offered to start as a barback with the possibility of working up, offered to take expensive classes I couldn’t really afford to get up to speed on how to make specialty drinks, and followed-up with every place I applied to – and I got a whopping zero calls back. As it turns out, people aren’t particularly interested in a 6’7” 250+ pound barback or bartender. As in most instances in my life when my back was against the wall and I really needed to find work, I relied on my size advantage to get employment. I applied as a bouncer at numerous bars and was hired quickly.

As you can probably imagine, bouncing in New York City gave me a lot of stories and a unique experience. I met tons of people I liked that I worked with or that were regulars at our establishments. I worked for a company that owned eight different bars around Manhattan, so I was shipped around different neighborhoods and really got all the bang for my buck out of the job. Truthfully, I’m glad I did it because it eventually led to me getting sober – even though it initially led me to being worse than I was originally (because free booze). But spending 50+ hours a week standing on your feet in bars and being the designated confronter of assholes really weighs on your spirit after a while. People threaten you, call you names, spit at you, and try to fight you. You have to escort people out who are vomiting all over the place. You have to deal with people selling drugs. You have to break into bathroom stalls while people are actively fucking. I had someone take a shit on the floor once. Trying to maintain a level of decency in New York City’s nightlife scene is like trying to be a sheriff in the wild west – you just end up settling for not having dead bodies everywhere. You couple all of this good stuff with the ever-present possibility that you might get shot, stabbed, or jumped by a group of people for the cost of a corner bodega sandwich with chips and a drink per hour and it starts making you think that you should close this chapter of your life sooner rather than later.

I’m still not ready to divulge the details of my current job for numerous reasons, but the gist of it is that I ended up buying into someone else’s vision for an intellectual product they had created. I believed that I was savvy enough in business and had the intuitive skills to leverage along with teaching myself the operational ins and outs of an online enterprise to help them really ramp up what they were doing. When I first came up with the idea to work together, they couldn’t even pay me $500 a week – so I started by helping to write copy for newsletters, website edits, and miscellaneous things for a few hundred dollars here and there on the side of my bouncing schedule. I would get home at 5am, wake up at noon, do some work, and then get ready to go back out on sheriff duty. Eventually, I leaned into my lesson from my failed negotiation in Colorado to help me present an offer that I felt was fair to both of us. It allowed me to put my fulltime focus and effort on this business venture while also working around their inability to guarantee me income. I put myself in a position where I was either going to deliver results that greatly benefited both of us, or I was going to fail and have to hit the job market again. I rolled the dice on myself once more despite the unfavorable outcomes of the past – I tried again without fearing the possibility of failure.

Needless to say, that decision did work out for me this time and continues to do so. But even that was a series of failed attempts before it really got going. My revenue target for the business the first month I started working full-time on it missed the mark by 80%. It was demoralizing and I questioned myself after bringing in way less than the minimum requirement I needed to support myself financially. But I felt conviction that I would get it right – so instead of dwelling on that failure I analyzed what went wrong, poured over information I found on Google, YouTube, and in books – and then I tried again. I committed to studying and applying simultaneously and sure enough, things started improving month over month, and year over year. To this day, I am always trying to teach myself something useful to do my job better. I try to learn something beneficial that can be used in my personal or professional life every single day. It sucks when an idea doesn’t work, but I no longer let it discourage me at all because I understand now that failure is another way of learning what I need to know to do things better the next time I try. I am all-in on making progress continuously and never worrying about anything being perfect. That’s been the secret sauce to this whole transformation. In fact, most of the best performing aspects of our business today are pieces of other things we tried that flopped initially and that we spliced together or came up with more inventive ways to deploy.

My point is this – if you dig into the self-help sphere or study any admirable businessperson who has found success in life in an honest way, you will undoubtedly hear something about the importance of failure. Some say, “Failure is the mother of all success” and others say, “Fail forward.” This blog post is essentially me using my life story to try to illustrate that same premise. If you fear failure, you fear success. Because you are never going to get one without the other. If you can internalize that truth and find the courage to reframe your mindset around failure so that you can experience it with indifference and channel your intelligence to use it to create a better opportunity to succeed on the next attempt, you will find yourself getting closer to your goals. Little wins compound over time into big wins, and when you approach life with the right attitude, your losses can actually set you up for much bigger wins down the road. There is freedom in failure when we recognize it as a temporary setback to learn from, rather than something final that crushes us. It can be painful, but all forms of growth are painful. Accept it, embrace it, utilize it. If failing is the worst outcome, realize that you can’t lose because failing doesn’t really mean anything. It only has as much power over you as you choose to give it. You have the ability to take every obstacle, every challenge, and every setback in your life and turn it into raw material that you can use to achieve your wildest dreams.

Remember: Failure is an inextricable component of progress – and continuous progress is the whole game.