I Don't Trust People Who Have Never Failed
It all starts with a tiny error in thinking
Drug dealers are thought of as the lowest scum on Earth.
I disagree. The worst humans on the planet are people who’ve never failed. They lie to us. They pretend to have a go. But they never do.
They refuse to fail which is a hate crime against humanity. If we don’t fail, humanity doesn’t progress. That’s a sin. It makes you a disgrace. My bizarre hack for figuring out if I can trust someone is to find out if they’ve ever failed.
Here’s a radically different way to think about failure so you can make your big goals a reality.
The most dangerous person you’ll ever meet
A few months back, a person committed fraud against me.
They paid for a coaching service that I delivered. The coaching call was recorded, and at the end, they kept saying how much the coaching helped. I left the meeting with a big smile. This is my legacy. This is why I quit my banking career forever.
A few weeks later, I got a notification saying this customer was accusing me of never delivering the service. I contacted them and went back and forth via email.
I was shocked to learn they were willing to lie and commit fraud against me, so they could avoid ever starting their business. Their problem wasn’t me, it was failure.
That’s right, they were willing to commit a crime to avoid the chance of failure.
I met another person through writing online who was similar. They’d got themselves into a sticky situation. Because of a divorce and a loss of job, they’d likely lose everything. To avoid the failure they took their own life. It broke my heart.
People who aren’t willing to fail will do crazy, murderous acts.
It all starts with a tiny error in thinking
We don’t come out of our mommy’s womb being failure-resistant. It’s a learned skill.
Avoidance of failure starts with not taking any risks. You won’t invest money in yourself. You won’t buy a $100 course. You won’t invest in financial assets like stocks. You won’t change jobs or ask for a leadership role.
And in my world, you won’t risk writing about your ideas and publishing them on social media (even under a nickname).
On the surface this seems like a small problem. But if you spend enough years not taking risks, your personal growth plateaus.
Then when the normal curveballs in life strike – sickness, loss of a loved one, redundancy – you’re up sh*t creek without a paddle holding a basket of g-strings and praying to a god you don’t believe in.
Not taking risks is a red flag.
Test: when was the last time you took a calculated risk?
The answer better not be “last year, mate” … or you’re screwed harder than my ex-banker colleague who slept with 100 partners in 365 days to prove a point to “tha boiz.” (Side note: I think he also got herpes.)
“The danger of inaction outweighs the risk of error” – Justin Welsh
The life-changing truth about failure that’s not obvious
Ready?
If you fail nobody gives a sh*t. (Except you.)
People don’t have time to focus on your failures. They’re too busy with their own. They’re too busy with workplace attendance, KPIs and keeping their slavedriver boss happy. Their phone fills up whatever other free attention they have left over.
So if nobody’s watching then who cares if you fail? Jesus? Tim Denning? Nope. Absolutely nobody cares. Now you’re free bird…fly high as a kite.
The best part of failure is easily overlooked
Stories are the driving force of humanity.
We all know that. Stories are what create famous people and produce movies that win Oscars. The common part of all good stories is failure. If a person is born into a billionaire family, starts a business, and buys a Bentley you don’t care. No one’s making a movie about that, right?
But if this same person was born poor, had to overcome struggles and failed many times, every Hollywood heavyweight wants to make the movie.
The more failures the more successful the movie.
The best things I’ve ever done ended in failure. They make for the best stories. They’re why people bother to read anything I’ve written.
If I didn’t…
Smoke the joint at 16 and pass out
See my best friend drown in a river
Start a $50M/year business that I walked away from
Go through an eating disorder
Suffer extreme mental illness
Go on over 100 dates looking for love and get rejected
Get left in the middle of the road by an ex-girlfriend
Lose my job in 2019 because of a dictator boss
Fail to return to banking
Lose $1.2M due to theft
… you’d never be reading this Substack. That’s the truth.
The failures make you magnetic. They make you human. They make you trustworthy. They make you seem worth knowing.
Failures help you generate your own wisdom.When you don’t fail you learn jack sh*t. You stay stuck in overthinking, procrastination, ma$trubation, and perfectionism. The road to hell is paved with a lack of failure.
Ever met a know-it-all? They’re the ones that don’t fail. And they throw peanuts at people like me who have failed.
“See, look at what Denning did wrong. He’s a crook I tell ya.”
The only criminals are those who’ve never failed and refuse to fail at anything so they can keep their big fat ego intact and pretend to be superhuman.
Instagram bikini babe influencers flying in private jets aren’t the liars. Nope. It’s the failure virgins.
“We shouldn’t glorify failure p*rn” – critics
Yes we should.
You should want to fail. You should expect to fail. Most things you try in life won’t work the first time. That’s the whole point. Trying one time is a disaster. You try the same thing multiple times and iterate slightly each time. That’s how you figure out what does work.
“It is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt” – Robert Greene
I treat life like a series of science experiments, even though I failed the subject (thanks to Professor Tweddle D*ck in high school).
No one knows what works.
Guessing doesn’t work. Neither does hoping, praying or relying on luck. And waiting to be chosen by gatekeepers definitely doesn’t work.
The only way to figure stuff the hell out is to 100% expect to fail.
Yet this goes counter to conventional wisdom. 99% of people aren’t willing to fail. They’re proactively trying to avoid failure at all costs. That’s why average people like me can succeed because there’s little to no competition.
What a time to be alive. Soak it up. Enjoy the view. Risk failing in all your glory because nobody gives a sh*t if you do.
The question from Tony Robbins that changed my life forever
Tony the tall mofo (god bless him) shook my world up when he challenged a group of us to answer this question:
What’s the worst that can happen?
The challenge is to get scary with it. Imagine your worst nightmare. Get creative. Picture all the doomsday scenarios. Imagine Orange Man Trump gets elected and a nuclear bomb goes off all in the same day. Times it by ten. Do a strip dance in Times Square. Stab yourself a few times with a steak knife to add some bloody effects.
Now…. what’s the worst that happens?
Not much.
You wake up the next day and try again, except this time you have some failures to tell you what NOT to do.
When I lost $1.2M in a day it felt like I was being cremated alive in a funeral parlour in front of my unborn daughter.
The money was gone but the way I made it wasn’t. I knew how to do it again. So I did. This time I made the money back 10x faster because I had the shortcuts already.
Whatever the nightmare scenario is, it’s a lie. Comebacks are always possible. They’re the default. And from the place of rock bottom you have the free motivation and drive to go faster than everyone else.
This is gonna sound whack, but I hope you fail with whatever goal you’re working on right now. I really want you to get this gift from heaven.
Closing Thought
Never trust people who refuse to fail.
If you’re currently someone who’s immune to failure, it’s time to stop being a criminal and change. There’s no way to get what you want without failure.
The myth of overnight success lied to you. America’s Got Talent isn’t going to give you a golden buzzer and make all your dreams come true (just look at the 99.99999999% of talent that never made it on any TV talent show).
The good news is you’re only one failure away from figuring out what does work, so you can finally live a life of freedom most will never be able to imagine. The barrier to entry is taking risks. The bar is extremely low.
Tell me which of these failure ideas you loved the most and why in the comments.
I send this email weekly. If you would also like to receive it, join the 126,000+ other smart people who absolutely love it today.
👉 If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
Tim, I discovered by iterating that my best performing stories are those where I fail first and then figure out a solution, however insignificant the problem may be. Even in writing, humans love to read stuff where a transformation happens.
"This is gonna sound whack, but I hope you fail with whatever goal you’re working on right now. I really want you to get this gift from heaven."
I have failed so many times at the goal I'm on now that this time I'm using those failures and shortcuts I learned to now be successful. And it's working. 🙌😉