Step 7. Fail Fast.

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Most people believe failure is not an option. Society teaches us that failure is for losers. The system makes us so fearful of looking bad that most folks never even get out and try. Others have such huge egos that failing at something makes them so angry.

Personally, I have seen the entire range of emotions teaching people to wake surf behind my boat. Everyone watches the videos and thinks to themselves how fun and easy it is until they are in the water. Some try once or twice and give up. Others get raging mad at themselves. Still, others get such a bruised ego that they make lame excuses to leave the lake early. At the same time, an entire group of folks don't even try after witnessing the first person having problems getting up. Rarely do you see that person that will not give up. They will try everything and anything to get up, which they do eventually. They are a rare breed.

Simple said you could fail without being a failure. Those that say they never "lose" or "fail" simply do not try hard enough at anything. They live in a comfort zone of mediocrity. They are never putting themselves at risk.

Failing Fast is the ethos of Silicon Valley. It is what makes it work better than anyplace else. No one holds failure against you. One of Elon Musk's co-founders at X.com told me once at a dinner that they failed 11 times before they came up with PayPal. 11 insanely stupid products that no one wanted or used. He said the one thing that the group never did was give up.

As I have mentioned many times before, the Hefe Platform has no single magical recipe for success. Each person that has found success with the platform took a completely different route to market the gig economy in their community. They were all laughed at by family, friends, and the first people they tried enrolling. But they did not give up. They tried new things every day. Learned from it quickly and adapted. Sometimes they tried the same darn script or hand-out flyer dozens and dozens of times until they figured out the missing piece that made it click.

Now an ego-driven smart person will take that first rejection super hard. A rich person with options would give up quickly as well. They always complain about why that stupid person they know has all the success and they don't. Well, that so-called stupid person doesn't know when to give up. I am one of those stupid people as well; I should have given up on my dreams years ago and stuck to the secure corporate job. I'd be a Senior VP making somewhere by now like many of my peers. Even with Hefe, we have had dozens of "smart" people come help. Almost all of them gave up because they were smart and we were too stupid. Right now, they are trying to crawl back to us as we find success (if you are one of those folks reading this right now, that is why I haven't returned your DMs).

Like all the previous steps in your plan, this is going to be hard as well. Every one of these steps is about transforming who you are as a person. Deprogramming all the bad skills, ideas, and lies that society taught us and inserting new programming of the super successful and extremely happy folks.

You will need to practice failing, not intentionally failing but trying hard enough that you will face difficulty constantly across multiple dimensions. In sports, that's called raising the bar. It will not be easy, but it will not be emotionally challenging because you have a strategy and an end goal in mind. When you get into the Fail Fast mindset, you will not need a drink to chill out, but you'll be seeking out new challenges, more information, and different perspectives to keep winning. You'll become addicted to winning. Through all that winning, you will start changing the lives of people around you. Building those stronger communities we talked about earlier. When your time comes, folks will line up and honor you for the person you were, the lives you touch, the legacy you left behind. They will be celebrating, telling jokes, and happy to have been touched by you. That is truly winning.

So get out there and Fail Fast. But before you do, you better get a few business basics down.