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Don’t decide what you want. If you do decide what you want, don’t think about why you want it. And if you do decide why you want it, commit to believing you can’t have it

Let’s start at the beginning. The worst thing you can do, if you are truly committed to being one of life’s failures, is to think clearly about what success means to you. We know that the best failures manage to avoid, at all costs, contemplating this most emotive of words.

On the other hand, it has been proven beyond any doubt, in study after study, that so-called high achievers have clearly defined what they want to do with their lives. And have lots and lots of reasons why they want to do it. They have a crystal-clear vision of the future. They know what they love to do. And have set goals that will enable them to do what they love to do. Goals that allow them to chase their passion, not their pension. Most importantly, these people also have a set of empowering beliefs that support them in creating the life they want to lead.

Yet the fact remains that very few people give the question of success, and what it means, any serious consideration. It shouldn’t be surprising that so few achieve success, because so few know what it actually is. Winston Churchill thought success was “the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm”. Another man, called Earl Nightingale, can you believe, spent 25 years thinking about success before coming up with what he claimed was the following definitive definition: “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal or goal.”

Let’s see if we can take some of these words and figure out what the heck Earl was talking about.

1. Progressive

Success is not something that happens now and again. It builds up over time. Earl thought that success was a journey, not a destination. He said the fun was as much in the travelling as it was in the arriving, or as Louis L’Amour said, “The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast and you miss all you are travelling for.” Also, the distance a person goes is not as important as the direction. Or as an old friend of mine, Glen McCoy, would put it: “Success to me is taking action, however small the step, in a direction that builds.” Crucially, whether or not you arrive at your destination is not half as important as the type of person you become as you travel.

2. Realization

This means the more you think about and focus on success on the inside, the more it materialises on the outside. Or in other words, if you can hold it in your head, you can hold it in your hand. Everything that exists was created twice – even you, some would say. If you are sitting down as you read this, the solid chair you are sitting on right now once existed only as a thought inside someone’s head. Then it was turned into a blueprint and finally into a real chair. But it all starts with a thought, and over time thoughts become things. Earl simply believed that if you controlled your thoughts, you controlled your life.

3. Worthy ideal or goal

Earl said this stood for an idea that you had fallen in love with. A goal that consumes your emotional, intellectual and physical self. He felt you should ask not, is this a worthy goal, but is the goal worthy of me? Is it worthy of my attention? Is it something I should be trading the days of my life for?

Of course, we should take the Uncle Richard stance on this and believe Earl was talking complete bollocks, but on the off-chance that after 25 years of study he just might be right, this means you can easily apply the same formula to failure. Failure must be progressive too. It’s also a journey. Focus on failure on the inside and you can manifest it on the outside. Instead of a worthy goal, have an unworthy goal like, say, just to own material or superficial things – cars, houses, boats, money and the like. As we’ll discover in more depth later, this is the perfect strategy for being a never-ending fuck-up.

Here is a second, much shorter definition of success: it’s a decision. And the decision is: what do you want to be, do and have? Just like the man who got off a boat in America at the beginning of the last century. He was a poor immigrant with just one dollar in his pocket. Over the next 20 years he went on to found one of the most successful chains of restaurants in the country. When asked when he had realised he was a success, he replied it was when he first got off the boat and decided to open a chain of restaurants. In that moment of decision he became already successful.

In over 25 years of working with hundreds of individuals, I know only a tiny percentage of the population have made that decision. The vast majority, which probably includes you, are helping the small few live the life of their dreams. Because you see, if you don’t think about the future, you don’t have one. So don’t do it. Don’t stop putting off making one of the most important decisions you could ever make.

Besides, even if you were to think about what you want to be, do and have, why take the risk of being disappointed? As children, all of us dream about what we could achieve. My advice is, don’t think about what your dream was. Don’t think about what your dream is right at this moment. Don’t imagine that it’s still possible to live it. Don’t stop being realistic or lowering your sights. Don’t be an ambitious dreamer. Don’t pay any mind to Walt Disney who said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Come off it Walt, I suppose next you’ll be saying we all have the opportunity to pursue our heart’s desire. Most people wait until they’ve been made redundant or fired before they feel they have the freedom to pursue their dreams passionately. So should you. This is perhaps the best way of wasting years of your life.

“Most people wait until they’ve been made redundant or fired before they feel they have the freedom to pursue their dreams passionately.”

The good news for students of fuck up and failure is that, even if you do decide what you really want, you’ll probably never take action to make it happen. For example, in a survey which asked people who had reached the ripe old age of 100 what they most regretted, they said they wished they had taken more risks and done the things that made them feel happy. If you want to be able to say the same thing when you are 100 years of age, commit right now to drifting aimlessly through your life. Of course, being a highly trained pessimist, you won’t make it that far because you’ll die younger. But trust me, it will have seemed like 100 years.