Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 99 of the Listening Time Podcast.
We're almost at episode 100.
I'm excited for that and I want to thank you all for listening and for helping me reach that milestone.
That's really cool that we're going to hit episode 100 and of course I'm going to do questions and answers to type episode for that one.
And I've received a lot of questions from you guys, and so I'll be recording that episode pretty soon and I'll choose some of those questions to answer in the next one.
So thank you all for your questions as well.
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All right, in today's episode, we're going to talk about failure.
This is a good topic to talk about because we all fail, right?
Nobody's perfect and it's important to know how to deal with failure, how to think about this concept of failure, etc.
So we'll talk about that today.
And remember that if you need the transcript for this episode, that's below the episode in the episode description.
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All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Okay, so let's talk about failure.
First of all, it's important to recognize that we all fail.
Nobody is perfect, and so we're gonna make mistakes.
We're gonna not succeed sometimes, and that's completely normal.
And sometimes we can get the impression that we fail much more than other people, and other people have their lives in order and are achieving great things and doing so much with their life or just their day.
We see other people posting the things that they want you to see, and those things are usually the positive things.
They're not going to post about all of their failures, all the times they didn't succeed.
They're going to post about the things that they did.
That will impress you.
That will look good on social media.
And so unfortunately, when we use these types of apps, we're only seeing the positives in other people's lives.
And this can make us feel like we have much more negative vibes or depressing lives than other people, because we're comparing the best of those people to our normal lives and, of course, their lives are going to look much better than ours if we make that type of comparison.
So don't be fooled by social media because other people fail just like you.
Remember that the word fool means to deceive someone.
So if I say don't be fooled, I'm saying don't be deceived. and don't be overly afraid of failure.
I think we shouldn't want to fail, of course.
We shouldn't be happy to fail.
However, we also shouldn't be overly afraid of failure.
We don't want to be terrified that we're not going to succeed when we start something, because that will prevent us from actually doing things.
If we're scared to fail, we'll probably just not do whatever it is that we planned on doing.
So don't be overly afraid of failure.
And it's really important to learn from failure.
So failure is gonna happen in our lives, and we can respond to that failure in different ways.
And the best way to respond to that failure is to learn from it, to see what lessons we can take from that failure and how we can do things differently the next time.
So that's something that we want to do when we fail.
That's the attitude that we should have when we are facing failure.
We should say, okay, this is a learning opportunity.
That's the attitude that we want to have.
We never want to let failure completely destroy us and make us feel like we're bad people or whatever.
We should try to learn from the times we don't succeed and then do things better the next time.
And I want to talk a little more about learning from failure, because this is something that I think we hear about a lot how we should learn from failure and get better the next time.
However, I think that there is a good amount of research that shows that many people don't actually learn well from most of their failures.
They actually have a type of mental obstacle that is hard for them to overcome in order to learn from their failures.
And in English, the word overcome refers to getting past some difficulty.
You are confronted with some problems, some trouble, some difficulty, whatever, and you overcome it.
You're able to succeed in getting past that issue, whatever it is.
You overcome that difficulty.
So research shows us that people can have trouble learning lessons from their own failure and And sometimes they don't really focus on their failures and they just want to forget about them or not learn lessons from them sometimes.
And I want to mention one specific experiment, one specific study that was done that demonstrates this.
So in this experiment, researchers had a group of people take a test.
And in this test, there were questions that had two choices.
One of them was right and one of them was wrong for each question.
Okay, so they had a 50% chance of getting each question right.
So the people took this test and then after that, they were shown their right and their wrong answers.
So they got to see which ones they got right and which ones they got wrong.
And then they took the test again.
They took the test a second time.
And so they had already seen all of their right and wrong answers from the first one.
So it was supposed to be easier the second time.
And there was also a reward the second time for each time they got the answer right.
So they were given a little bit of money every time they got an answer right on the second test.
And what was interesting is that most of the people remembered their correct answers from the first test.
So they were able to remember those and answer them correctly again on the second test.
However, many of the people didn't remember as many of their incorrect answers from the first test.
So they answered those same questions incorrectly again on the second test, even though they were shown their results from the first test and they were shown all of the answers that they got right and wrong.
Regardless of that, they tended to remember their correct answers, but not their incorrect answers.
And so this experiment shows us that some people have trouble learning from their failure.
They might tend to focus on the successes that they had and the lessons that they can learn from their success.
And then they might just forget their failures and try to move on and not really think about them too much.
And that's a shame, I think, because we can learn a lot from our failure and we can do things differently in the future to have more success.
So I think that that should be our goal.
And so I want to talk about three specific failures that I've encountered in my life and the lessons I learned from them.
So the first failure I want to talk about is film school.
I think I mentioned in a previous episode that I attended film school when I was 18.
I thought that I wanted to work in the film industry and make films, and that was something that I had as a dream when I was young and a little immature.
And I didn't know what exactly I wanted to do.
And I thought that film sounded interesting.
So I went to film school and I very quickly realized that I didn't like it.
I realized that I didn't like any of the technical aspects of filmmaking that, And I realized that I didn't like the industry at all.
I didn't like the culture in that industry.
I didn't really like anything about it.
And that was really disappointing because I had signed up for a one year course.
That was very intense and I had to do a lot of stuff every day during that program.
And so I didn't actually finish the program.
I actually stopped halfway through and dropped out of film school.
In English when we use the phrasal verb drop out, when you drop out of school or drop out of a program, what we're saying is that you don't finish it.
You actually quit in a way.
And so I dropped out of film school and only did half of that year.
And so what did I learn from this failure?
Well, one lesson that I learned is that I shouldn't commit to things that I'm not very sure about.
So it's okay to commit to things that you're not 100% sure about.
Maybe you're 95, 99% or whatever.
However, for me, I hadn't really done my research on the film industry and on what would be required of me to work in this industry and what the lifestyle is like.
I didn't really do my research on that.
And so I was very naive when I entered into this program and I thought it would be easy and just fun fun, and that I would be really good and I would be a natural in this industry.
And so that was not the case.
And I should have known that beforehand.
I shouldn't have committed to to going to this program and trying to become a filmmaker, because I didn't really know anything about this.
I committed to this without knowing much.
So that was something that I learned is that I shouldn't commit to things that I don't know much about.
I should be much more sure before committing.
And another thing that I learned from this failure is that I shouldn't continue with something if I know for sure that it's wrong, if I know for sure that it's not for me.
So this is something I realized when I was in film school, that this was the wrong choice.
And so I needed to just stop and not be disappointed that I wasn't gonna finish my program.
I should just stop now and not waste my time and move on to the right thing.
So it's okay if you stop something early if you know for sure that it's the wrong thing.
You shouldn't feel like you always have to finish everything even if it's wrong.
So here's kind of a simple example of this is that if you're reading a book and you realize that you don't really like this book when you're about a quarter of the way through it, you should just stop reading.
You don't have to force yourself to finish the whole book if it's like torture for you.
In English, when we say that you're a quarter of the way through something or you're halfway through it, this means that you're a quarter of the way done or you're halfway done.
So if you're a quarter of the way through it and it's really boring for you, you don't like it, you don't have to finish it right.
You can stop if you want.
And so that's something that I learned from film school.
And another failure that I had is with my website.
So I used to have a website.
That's not available now, but I made a big mistake with this website because it wasn't well thought out.
In English, if we say something is well thought out, this means that you have really thought things through before doing that thing.
You've considered all the different aspects of it and you plan it in an effective way before you do it.
This is something that's well thought out.
So this website was not well thought out.
It had a poor model.
During that time I released 1 seminars that would expire in a certain amount of time and you had to sign up for those seminars through the website.
And it just wasn't a very intuitive model and it wasn't very attractive and I wasn't having a lot of success with it, and it was just the wrong thing.
This was not the way I needed to go about my business, and then I switched to my membership model after that, and now I use the Patreon website to release content every month, and this content does not expire.
You can watch it whenever you want.
It's not going to go away.
By the way, in english, the verb expire means that something goes bad or it goes away after a certain amount of time, so my content doesn't expire.
You can continue to consume it forever as long as you're a member, And that's a much better model.
People like that a lot better.
And I'm having a lot more success with that.
And so of course, my old website does not exist anymore.
That was a failure.
And I learned that I need to think more about my students, my customers, so to say, and what they want, what they need, not what I think is an interesting thing to offer.
I need to think about what my students actually want, what they're actually looking for.
So that's a lesson that I learned.
And I learned that when you start something on your own a business or whatever there will always be failures along the way.
And you just need to accept that and expect it and move past those failures, overcome those failures.
That acceptance of knowing that you will fail when it comes to starting something on your own, that's something that you should enter into that project with.
You should enter in with that mindset, knowing that you're not going to get everything right the first time.
You might have some failures with your website or whatever, and that's normal.
So that's important for people that want to start something on their own.
They shouldn't expect to get it right the first time.
There's a lot of trial and error.
That just means that you're going to make mistakes and then learn from those mistakes.
And one other failure I had was that I bought a car last year that had so many problems and I didn't even realize it when I bought the car.
This was a very old used car.
And I don't know anything about cars.
And so I just thought that it was a good deal, because I was able to negotiate the price down from the original price.
And I thought I was getting it for a cheap price.
And that's the only thing that I really considered.
I was able to get this car for cheap.
And because I don't know anything about cars, I bought a car that I shouldn't have bought.
And it had many problems.
I had to take it to the mechanic to fix tons of things.
And I realized that we had to put a lot of money into this car.
And it ended up being much more expensive than what I had thought, and we ended up actually selling this car for less than what we bought it for, so i ended up losing a lot of money on this car.
It was a terrible mistake and it was a mistake that i learned lessons from, because i don't want to make this mistake again.
So number one i learned that i should not make these types of big decisions when I don't have the knowledge to make them.
So I don't know anything about cars, so I shouldn't make a big decision without consulting experts first, or at least people that know a lot more than I do.
That's something that I need to do before making such a big decision and spending money like this.
And I learned that discounts can still be a waste of money.
You can think that you're getting a discount, but at the end of the day, it's such poor quality that you have to spend more money to repair that thing.
So discounts aren't always a good deal.
You might actually still lose money.
And one other lesson that I learned is that sometimes it's better to take your losses and move on.
It wouldn't have been good for me to try to wait until I could get a better price for this car or fix it up so that I could sell it for even more money.
No, it was better for me to just sell it for a lower price, move on and get on with my life, because it was causing me so much stress and I just needed to get rid of this car and get some money back and move on with my life because, like I mentioned, I was so stressed out about this.
So it was better for me to just accept the fact that I was going to lose money.
All right, that's all for today.
I hope this episode was interesting for you.
Remember that if you want my advanced episodes, then make sure to sign up and become a Listening Time family member.
The link is in the episode description below this episode.
That's patreon.com slash listening time.
And please share this podcast with anyone else you know who's learning English and help them and help the podcast grow.
All right, I'll talk to you next time on episode 100 of the Listening Time podcast.
