Hello everyone and welcome to another article of Success Quotes. Today, we’re going to look at a quote by Paulo Coelho.

Paulo Coelho said, “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

What we’re going to do with this quote is to rephrase it. We’re going to look at the fear of failure from a different angle, to spur you into action.

THE BEST WAY TO FAIL IS NOT TO ACT
I’ll rephrase this quote as follows: the best way to fail is not to act. If we look at the fear of failure in this way, we immediately feel like taking action, because we generally say to ourselves “I have a project, an ambition, and I’m afraid of failing. If I take action and it doesn’t go as I planned, I risk failing and my family and friends may tell me that I’m useless, that I’m incompetent and that I can’t do it.”

This is the classic view of the fear of failure. You want to do something, but you say to yourself “if I take action, I might not succeed, I’m afraid I’ll be laughed at and I won’t take action because I’m afraid of failing.”

Now, if we rephrase this vision, and say that the best way to fail is not to act. If you want to give yourself the best chance of failing, don’t act. For example, if you’ve been wanting to write a book for a long time, and you say to yourself “I’m a bit afraid of writing a book because people will make fun of me, they’ll tell me I can’t write, people close to me will make fun of me.”

It could be a book or anything else. If you say that, then you don’t act because you’re afraid of how others will look at you. If we take the opposite problem: if the best way to fail is not to act. If you tell yourself that, if you don’t act, you’re sure and certain to fail, to never write your book.

TO FAIL IS NOT TO ACHIEVE A GOAL
Is failure just trying to do something, taking action and not succeeding, or is it failing to achieve the goal? There’s a huge difference. For me, failure is not reaching an objective, it doesn’t mean you didn’t act on the objective. If you never take action, you’re sure to fail. If someone wants to write a book and doesn’t even start writing the first page, he’s sure his book will never be written.

Taking action gives you the beginnings of concrete results.
On the other hand, let’s take another case: if the person who wants to write a book starts writing it, but doesn’t manage to finish it, there will be two main advantages. They’ll have something tangible, even if it’s only ten or fifteen pages. She’ll have them on her computer, on paper. She’ll have the beginning of her book written. In itself, that’s a victory, because by writing those fifteen pages, she’ll have learned to write, she’ll have familiarized herself with writing, and she may have received constructive criticism from those around her.

Even if her attempt was unsuccessful, even if she didn’t write the whole book, on the one hand she’ll be able to start writing again later, and on the other she’ll have made progress in the field of writing. In this sense, even if you don’t get the result you want, it’s already progress, not failure. But if you don’t take action, you’re sure to fail.

TAKING ACTION MEANS NO REGRETS
The second advantage is that this person will have no regrets. Ten years from now, when that person says “I always wanted to write a book, but I never did. I may never have done it, I may never have succeeded in writing my book, but on several occasions I’ve tried, and today I’ve already written fifty pages”. She has no regrets, because she tried.

If you have projects on which you’ve never taken action, change your perspective if you’re afraid of failure: don’t say to yourself “if I act and don’t succeed, I’ll fail”, say to yourself instead “if I don’t act, I’m sure I’ll fail. But if I try and fail, I’ll have made progress”.

This change of perspective with regard to the project and the vision you have of the fear of failure is essential, if you don’t want to risk having regrets later on.

I’m going to repeat Paulo Coelho’s quote before I finish this article: “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”, rephrasing it: the best way to fail is never to act.