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Hey, can I ask you a question?
If someone told you, ‘You are 30 failures away from your first million dollars,’
How fast would you fail?
Let's be honest—most of us have been conditioned to avoid failure at all costs.
We've built our whole lives around the illusion of constant competence.
You feel it when you hesitate to speak up in meetings because your idea might not land.
You know it when you abandon hobbies at the first sign of difficulty.
You notice it when your sourdough starter fails, and you decide baking isn't "your thing" after all.
This fear isn't random.
From our earliest school days, we're trained to equate mistakes with shame.
Red marks on papers.
Grades that reduce our worth to letters and numbers.
The quiet disappointment when we don't measure up.
The subtle message then becomes clear:
Successful people don't fail—or if they do, they certainly don't talk about it. 🤷♂️
The result? We play it safe. We stick to what we know.
We procrastinate on dreams that actually matter, because the potential for failure feels like too high a price to pay.
The painful irony is that this protective instinct, this avoidance of failure, becomes the very thing that guarantees we'll never reach our potential.
We've created a perfect system for ensuring mediocrity while wondering why extraordinary achievement feels out of reach.
What if there's another way to look at this whole equation?
The Mathematics of Failure
What if we looked at failure through the lens of simple math?
If you knew with absolute certainty that you were exactly 30 failures away from mastering a skill or achieving a breakthrough, each failure wouldn't be a setback—it would be measurable progress.
Think about it: When you fail for the first time, you're not at zero—you're at 1/30th of the way to your goal.
After five failures, you're 16.7% of the way there.
Ten failures? Congratulations, you're a third of the way to success.
Suddenly, failure isn't something to avoid—it's something to accumulate as quickly as possible.
You now start to fail bigger and faster.
Consider the VC’s (Venture Capitalists) approach: they know that roughly 7 out of 10 startups will fail, but the successes will more than compensate for the failures.
They're not trying to avoid failure—they're trying to fail efficiently to find the winners faster.
The most successful people don't fail the least—they fail the most in the least amount of time.
They compress decades of failure into years, years into months, months into weeks. They understand that failure isn't just inevitable—it's necessary.
So the question isn't whether you'll fail on the path to your goal.
The question becomes:
How quickly can you collect those 30 failures that stand between you and success?
History's most successful people weren't those who avoided failure—they were those who redefined it.
Thomas Edison famously made over 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at creating the light bulb.
When asked about his failures, he replied, "I didn't fail. I just found 1,000 ways that won't work."
This pattern repeats everywhere you look.
The founders of Airbnb were rejected by seven investors and struggled to get anyone to use their service initially.
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by 12 publishers before someone took a chance on it.
James Dyson created 5,126 failed prototypes over 15 years before finally inventing his revolutionary vacuum cleaner.
Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime despite creating over 900 works of art that would later be recognized as masterpieces.
This is my 50th newsletter.
That means I wrote 49 of these dials before today.
Each bad dial got me closer to writing good ones.
…
The question isn't whether you have what it takes to succeed.
The question is whether you're willing to collect your necessary failures faster than most people.
Because while talent may be distributed equally, the willingness to fail isn't.
The math is simple. 30 failures stand between you and success.
You can collect them slowly over the years. Or rapidly over months.
The outcome is the same. The timeline is your choice.
Here's your action plan:
Pick one goal you've been avoiding.
Commit to a specific number of failures in that area.
Track them. Count them. Collect them like badges.
Celebrate each failure as progress, not a setback. (important)
The truth? These failures will happen regardless.
The only question is how fast you're willing to get them out of the way.
The people you admire aren't failing less. They're failing faster.
They know that failure isn't the opposite of success. It's a required ingredient.
Stop trying to avoid what's necessary. Start collecting what's inevitable.
Your 30 failures are waiting.
How quickly will you claim them?
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