Why You Fail At Almost Everything (Hustling Harder Won't Fix It)
A guide to unlocking your hidden superpower (and how you've been using it against yourself)
The harsh truth is that most people don’t achieve their goals.
Some never see results in the first place. Others gain momentum and start seeing first signs of success only to hit a wall and fail to move past it.
Again, again, and again.
You can have the best strategy, information, and ideas – but still fail miserably.
But why? Is it all about luck?
Yes and no. Let me explain with a story.
I remember my first attempt at building a brand online.
If you’ve ever given it a go, you know how hard it is. You do your best, provide value, stay consistent and still, no results.
The reason I failed was not because I didn’t have the skills.
But because I started focusing on the wrong things when it got tough, instead of repeating what was already working.
Let me explain.
In the beginning, everything worked fine.
I gained followers on X quickly. I posted content based on my personal experience and whatever I learned and studied at the time.
People were digging my content, and I saw my follower count go up from hundreds to a thousand.
The problem?
I didn’t make any money.
It’s tough to monetize your brand when you’re not directly talking about money or a skill that will result in making money.
Fact is, making money with “mindset content” is tough.
I knew this from the start but 2 months in, my focus went more and more towards money and the idea of not getting there at all.
With that change in attitude, going from - I want to improve people’s lives and share the solutions that helped me overcome my problems, to - I need to make money QUICK.
You can guess what impact this had on my content.
It wasn’t great.
I started posting content based on ideas I thought would be easier to monetize. My brand became inauthentic and stale. My drive to keep going faded, and the vision I had for the brand started getting blurry.
All because I started focusing on what wasn’t there.
I put my attention on things I didn’t want to happen. I imagined growing my following to thousands of people and still not a single person wanting to spend money with me.
The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t make money. It would have gotten to that eventually.
It was that I imagined the worst possible outcome, instead of what I desired. I focused entirely on what I wanted to avoid and started posting content with twisted intentions.
There is no happy ending to this story.
I stopped posting 7 months after I opened that Twitter account because I no longer saw the vision. I lost the ‘why’
I was doing it for the wrong reasons.
Only much later I realized that my imagination was the underlying problem.
I imagined what I didn’t want to happen (not being able to monetize), and it’s exactly what I got. Not because I tried everything and it didn’t work out, but because of what I focused on.
What’s the lesson here?
You might be thinking it’s “don’t focus on money, focus on service” or something but no, it’s much deeper than that.
It’s that our imagination has immense power, and we must be extremely careful how we use it.
It’s a superpower.
It can lead to success but if not used right, it can lead to your demise.
You might be thinking “Come on it had nothing to do with your imagination, you just didn’t put in the work”
That’s not quite it. Let me explain why.
Our imagination shapes our actions more than we realize. What we picture in our minds - whether success or failure - dictates our behavior, choices, and even motivation.
Think about it.
If you truly believe something is possible, you act accordingly. You take risks, stay consistent, and find ways to make it work.
Your attention starts moving towards the achievement of that goal and overcoming obstacles that are in the way. In his book Psycho Cybernetics Dr Maxwell Maltz referred to this process in the brain as the success mechanism.
The idea is that our subconscious mind functions like a servomechanism.
Which is an automated system that uses feedback to precisely control the movement of a device, adjusting its actions based on real-time data.
A clear destination/goal is set, and the device goes there by constantly course correcting and readjusting itself to the destination.
Similar to a self-guided missile for example. The goal is set once, the rest is automatically carrried out by the missile.
According to research, our brain operates in the same way.
When we set a clear goal and believe in it, our subconscious works automatically to move us toward success by adjusting our thoughts, behaviors, and actions. Imagine it like a goal-chasing software that constantly adjusts to your input (what you imagine).
On the other hand, if you focus on what you don’t want, your subconscious takes that as a “goal” and does everything in its power to make it into reality. Again, by adjusting your thoughts, behaviors, and actions.
Whatever you imagine – your subconscious perceives it as your goal.
That’s exactly what happened to me.
My actions were no longer guided by the excitement of building something meaningful but by the fear of failing to make money.
The moment I shifted my focus from desire to fear, my creativity took a hit, and my content lost its authenticity. I didn’t lose the skill to create good content - which is what I thought at the time.
I believed that I ran out of ideas and that I was simply not “qualified” for it.
However, it was my imagination that facilitated the failure. I did achieve my goal; I just didn’t know that it was “set” to failure.
This isn’t just my story. It happens to entrepreneurs, athletes, and artists all the time.
It’s the classic progression:
- They start strong and motivated and see first results
- They begin to doubt and imagine negative outcomes (“What if I fail?”, etc)
- They start facing more and more problems and eventually give up
Maybe you yourself have been there. It happens to most of us.
Back then I didn’t know about this, I thought I just needed effort and discipline. But focused on the wrong goal, no amount of discipline will get us where we want to be.
So, what’s the solution?
Realize that imagination is your superpower.
It’s not about merely visualizing your dream life, it’s much deeper than that.
Whatever goal you want to achieve or problem you want to solve, imagine yourself at the other side of that process.
With no regards to the means of getting there – focus on the end result and see yourself there. How does it feel to have already achieved that goal or overcome that obstacle?
Don’t just sit down every day and visualize for a few minutes.
Become extremely aware of what you think about all day. A 30-minute visualization session is a drop in the ocean if you spend the rest of your day imagining the opposite.
It’s about consistency and focus.
Know exactly what your goal is and why. Use it as fuel for your imagination, don’t get carried away by your conditioned patterns of focusing on what you don’t want.
Don’t try “not to fail”. Erase the thought of failing from your mind and focus on what you want instead.
Trust the process and keep showing up.
The more you focus on action, the easier it is to stay on course. Use action as fuel for your imagination and build up that momentum.
Everyone you look up to got to where they are because of this.
And everyone who failed before you was focused on the exact opposite.
Remember, it’s your success mechanisms duty to fulfill any goal you set.
In the end, imagination isn’t just daydreaming - it’s the foundation of everything we create. Use it wisely, and it will be your greatest ally.
Misuse it, and it will be your downfall.