Skill Development - Paying the Price

A wise man once told me that the secret to success it to "Figure out the price you have to pay to get successful... and pay it." What i've learned is that the price of success is often a huge amount of failure. Not-so-surprisingly, many successful people share this view that success often comes from the courage to fail over and over.


Bruce Jenner (hey don't hate on me I wrote this in April of 2011), a guy worth an estimated $100 Million, had this to say about success. "I'm the type of guy who fails and fails and fails, and then, as if failure has become sick of him, succeeds." In his estimation, success comes down to never giving up.

Richard Branson says "It has been like hitting up against a solid brick wall. All day and all night long, we battled to get through it."

Colin Powell says “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”

Benjamin Franklin said “I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong”

C.S. Lewis says "Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”

David Viscott says “To fail is a natural consequence of trying, To succeed takes time and prolonged effort in the face of unfriendly odds. To think it will be any other way, no matter what you do, is to invite yourself to be hurt and to limit your enthusiasm for trying”


Since my success in learning dating skills, i've started on two major tasks that are now staring me right in the face. The first, my fitness, has been challenging me for the past four months and i'm happy to say I believe i'm over the hurdle and might someday be able to handle this task on my own free of a trainer's help. The second, my two new businesses, are still smacking me in the face with failure/lack of progress.

So how can I successfully deal with failure and still know that it's going to all turn out well in the end? How can I gain resilience?

I want to recommend two things for each and every guy seeking to earn success through failure in the shortest amount of time possible.

1. Find yourself a mentor who is both available to lead you through the process, and who is successful at the exact skill you're seeking to learn. And don't find just anyone, go as close to the "source" as possible.

and

2. Throw the biggest pile of money at them you can afford (if that's what's required to learn from them).

Why would I say this? Is it because i'm hoping you'll throw a pile of money at me to learn from me? Well, I honestly can't say that's a bad idea, given that my exact path to dating success came from me finding Brad and throwing him some money. More importantly, when you have a need to learn a skill, nowadays you can almost always find someone who has or is devoting their life towards teaching that skill that you'd like to learn.

Let me give you an example. If I'm a very self-motivated, driven Joe Shmoe and I feel like I need some self help, I could definitely spend very little money on getting that self help. I might hit my local library, check out two Tony Robbins books, and painstakingly rummage through each chapter until I finish the whole book over the course of maybe a year or two (BTW Brad did this). If you're a person like this, you can stop reading and haul your ass to the library right now, cause this post won't mean much to you.

However, if you're like me, then you probably thought "fuck that" like the second you read it. If that's the case, then you're likely gonna need some help doing your self-help cause you're a person that needs some help with motivation through the impending failures. So if you want that help, i'd recommend going right to the source of the help.

Get the best, most experienced help you can afford. I recommend this because sometimes inexperienced people can be good, but more often than not you can really mess yourself up when you're starting something new and you happen to get some advice that isn't really solid. I've found that the bang for your buck is best when you go straight to the top, not to mention you won't take as long to learn the skill you're trying to acquire.

Using my personal trainer as an example, I'd rather pay him the $90 an hour that he asks for and have him make a plan for me to work out two more days a week than pay $30 for some shithead 3 times a week who is inexperienced.

So there is an exception to this, and i'd say that exception is if you're a rank beginner at your skill and you can't really afford the best at all. In this case, there are often people higher up in the food chain than newbies who can teach you the basics without you having to spend bank on someone who has far more advanced answers than you'll need for awhile. Balance this our yourself, because it realistically might be the case that you could spend 80% the price of the top dog on someone who will do just about as good a job on you because they've been taught by the top dog.

I wanted to write this out for anyone reading who thinks any of us coaches are fucking superheros or something. Guess what? We're pretty normal guys, we've just found a formula for self-help that works for our individual characteristics, and that's what I wanted to share with you today. Best of luck!