To set up yourself for success, you have get into doing things where you win even when you fail. The biggest problem when starting anything on your own, it’s motivation, when you don’t have a boss or professor to set objectives and a framework. You’re more likely to abandon your goals and fail.

The reason it’s that we as humans think a lot about opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is ==the value of the best alternative that’s sacrificed when a decision is made==. When we are in school, university or a job most of the desicions are taken by us and doing something in your own like self studying means not gaining a certification or studying something that won’t led to anything. Starting a business versus getting a job where in the job the money is secured, and stable but when working for yourself means not making any money or even worse loosing money. We have fear of failure. What we can do to alleviate it?

The solution it’s to reduce or even remove the possibility of failure. And how we can do it?

I’ll give you examples of studying on your own and starting a business.

Starting a business

If you build a business you’ll learn many skills like in tech marketing, administration, time management, project management and more. Even if you fail, these skills will be helpful in your life. You can fallback into getting in the job market with the new skills that you gained while building your business, or even start another one, now with the new skills as an advantage.

Studying In your own

I started learning English, because I wanted to get a higher paying job than minimum wage in the country I was in, that didn’t require a degree and I wanted to stop working as an advertiser. I worked very hard studying and immersing myself in the language for more than 6 hours a day. Even taking my remaining free time to research about language learning. I started the regular way with watching YouTube videos similar as I’m school where they teach you with your native language and using Duolingo. After researching about language learning I found that immersion and comprehensive input it’s far more efficient than using your natiylanguage and studying grammar.

Around 3 months in I was able to understand most of the TV shows, and YouTube videos, that I was watching. Around 6 months I started to schedule classes with native speakers and I was able to communicate most of what I wanted to say, yeah with a lot of mistakes but I was able to start speaking.

The reason I was able to put this much time and energy it’s because I knew that even if I failed, I’d success in some other way, meaning that if I didn’t get the job and I’d have English as a second language, and that would be beneficial for me me in my personal life too. But what if I failed and I didn’t learn anything? Then I’d know which methods don’t work for language learning for me. I did learned which methods didn’t worked.

One day, this was around 7-8 months in I think, my mom send me information about a program where they were looking for people between 18-28 years old where If they passed a B1 test the would help them to continue educationn with them and get a C1 level ans certification, and they would help you get a job. This was a collaboration between the government, companies that needed bilingual workers and an academy. This sounded too good to be true but I still applied, since I didn’t receive a reply in a couple of weeks and I didn’t trust my skills enough I thought I didn’t pass the test. But a month later I received the confirmation that I passed. They also were paying me half minimum wage this allowed me to drop my last client in advertising and put all my time into Language learning. The program was full time from Monday to Friday and I continue to watch TV shows in English, (I was hooked to watching Dexter at the time). And after 5 months the program ended, I gained a C1 certification (although I think I properly gained C1 level many months after) and the program would host meetings with companies where they show jobs available kind like a job fair but online or sometimes they would send it via emails. After some interviews I end up getting a customer service job.

A real failure

You might say that story doesn’t matter much because I got lucky and still it was ac Another endeavour that I just started it’s content creation, my initial goal is to succ