It only takes a blink, and with it I’m back in that damp, thin-walled bedroom I found myself in the fall of 2012 – broke, beaten down, with no sign of life plan.
Certain moments in life can be recalled with a simple closing of the eyes.
With an eye close, I can go back to that late October day as a forever moment for true humility and painstaking realization of how everything can be taken from you.
Back then, I had recently returned to English soil, having been given my marching orders from US immigration 3 months earlier, and I was trying to make sense of life.
Limited funds, a new job in an industry that didn’t excite me, and now unpacking my bags in my new rented bedroom (not apartment, just the room), which was one of five bedrooms in a house I would now live in with four complete strangers.
I was in survival mode.
The only plan I had was wake up, go to your job, and wait for this to make sense.
I was not ready to “deal with it.” I was too busy being the victim of a nightmare of sequences that emptied my optimism tank, and the situation was owning me in a way where any form of mental practices to get me out of it were impossible to consider.
As much as I love to share a take on growth mindset, assertiveness, or fill in the blank of an inspiring Instagram reel, life is sometimes just too much of a bastard to play in that space.
And yet, I consider myself fortunate for having gone through it.
Not for the glamourous reasons most people speak to today such as “it made me who I am” and “I had to go through it to learn about myself”.
I genuinely consider myself fortunate simply knowing what failure, adversity, misery, and even depression can feel like. The state itself is a gift!
Failure has been a topic of conversation across most of my podcast discussions so far in 2025. How we fear it. How it’s not a result but a lesson. How it can be the making of us. All the typical podcast insights you’d expect on a growth-minded show like mine.
Recently, I spoke with former MLB pro turned performance coach, Chris Vasami (listen here), and as we navigated his life and lessons around failure and adversity, something resonated I feel needs addressing when we discuss this failure topic.
If you are going to understand it, you must have truly experienced it. I mean experienced it in a way where life has hit you, pinned you down, overwhelmed you, and left you with no direction for how to get back up.
I say this as someone who prides himself on not being an extremist and I am often coaching people away from their “extreme” tendencies.
But at a certain point, to form the mental capacity to navigate seasonal adversities with a “this is happening for me” or “what am I going to do about this” perspective, we need firsthand or at least an intimate bystander’s view of how bad things can be.
Chris’s experience with high stakes strike outs on the biggest stages, to living for extended periods with cancer and thyroid disease allows him a sense of knowing how bad life can get and how easy it is to sit and stew in the crapness of it all.
He doesn’t understand adversity or failure because of what he has read, learned, listened to, or scrolled through.
He understands it because he has lived it for extended periods and allowed himself to feel the failure/sadness/adversity in a way that he can describe the details and emotions that came with it.
And, like myself, there is a fortune he speaks to today because of what he came through and the perspective that has bestowed upon him.
As much as we can use our goals and dreams as the catalyst for discipline, I happen to believe the ability to know how bad things can get is the ultimate catalyst for discipline.
For instance, I NEVER let myself get out of shape (humble brag), because the first time I learned what it’s like to get out of shape (the failure), I never wanted to experience getting back in shape again.
And the lesson I took from 2012 is when I ignore my emotions and allow myself to shut the world out, I find myself detached and in places that scare the life out of me, so now I share emotions, welcome people into my highs and lows, and avoid the sheer terror I can associate with being alone and lost.
Sure, there are many inspiring conversations I can point you toward for how we can better frame failure – I have been at the center of many on the show – but at a certain point, the familiarity of the failure is the part we need more than anything.
So, yes, as you will have heard frequently, we should not fear failure because it can be a teacher.
But above all, fear is familiarity that we are fortunate to feel (crushed the alliteration) and with a simple closing of the eyes and reflection on the past, it’s an emotion we can access whenever we want.
So go ahead – close your eyes
Find that moment
And instead of flinching, find a way to smile
It’s your reference point for reality that you are fortunate to have known