It Sounds Totally Backward, But ACHIEVING Failure is the Key to Success in Life

I pushed my hernia back in after completing my fifth set of heavy barbell squats and stepped back to recover, but I knew my brutal leg workout wasn’t even half over.

In fact, it was just beginning.

Even though I had just achieved muscular failure performing the squat (that’s when you physically, LITERALLY CANNOT perform another rep, not when “you” want to stop), I still had to do the same thing with the linear leg press, leg extensions, leg curls, and seated calf raises, before moving on to decline sit-ups and a final half-hour of walking cardio.

Yea, Wednesdays suck.

But I’m standing there with my legs on fire and I’m thinking:

This mindset wasn’t an accident, and I’m also not just referring to what it does for me in the gym.

This is my daily, 16-hours-a-day attitude, and it’s a major reason why I’ve moved so far ahead in life and why most people will never catch up to me.

Adopting it will set YOU apart as well - if that’s something you want for yourself.

You can do it — inside and outside of the gym — but training/working to failure is about going so far beyond what everyone else is willing or capable of doing that they have no CHOICE but to say, “Alright, you can have this one.”

This mindset also isn’t something I was born with. It developed over time, thanks in large part to the influence of a famous bodybuilder in the 1980s to whom I’ll introduce you shortly.

But the attitude, mindset, and will that I’ve developed changed everything for me, and it represents a completely new way of thinking about failure.

So you know by now that “failure” is the term for when you literally cannot perform another rep. Or another sales call. Another paragraph. Another movement. Another five minutes of dedicated work.

Failure is the rare space in which all growth occurs.

You see, in the body, muscle growth is an adaptation to stress. You subject your muscles to so much pain, so much discomfort, so much misery that your muscles are forced to get stronger for next time.

Well, as it is in the gym, so it is in life.

But most people don’t even get close to failure, and that’s why you see the same people in the gym maybe 6 months apart, lifting the same weight, weighing the same, wearing the same-fitting clothes, etc.

They’re not forcing adaptation.

They’re not commanding their muscles to grow.

They’re not willing to push past the “pain barrier,” beyond which all the results they’re looking for will appear. They just never make it.

But YOU can make it! You can push through to that higher level that most people will never even come close to reaching. You can ACHIEVE failure, and push onwards to success.

I still have to get my hernia repaired (I have an appointment with the surgeon in August), but I was driving home after the gym and I realized that every time you train to failure, you’re literally breaking through to a higher level of consciousness.

This new mental state is inaccessible to anyone and everyone who’s not willing to push past the pain and the discomfort in order to force growth and adaptation. Again, not just in the gym, but in the rest of their lives as well.

The existentialist philosopher Colin Wilson speaks about this idea/experience in his insanely popular bestseller from the 1950s, I’ve experienced it firsthand many times, and Tom Platz (the bodybuilder I’ve been referring to all this time) showed me the way there as well.

He taught me that most people don’t want what’s hard. They want what’s EASY, what looks showy. They know that squats are hard — that’s why they don’t do them! But you know what?

As Tom says, if you push through, and you’re willing to go that hard, to do what other people won’t do, and keep going when everything inside you is telling you to stop…

If you’re willing to go there, then you DESERVE the legs you get from that.

You get to say to yourself, “I EARNED THIS!” And you gain access to that higher level of consciousness where life is even more alive, and where the greatest of the great have visited and kept returning for more.

So yes, failure is a legitimate achievement. You have to WORK to get there. Failure doesn’t just “happen” because you showed up.

It doesn’t just happen because you got to the gym, put your little workout shoes on, did a few of these and a few of those.

No, you have to EARN failure.

You have to ACHIEVE failure, and when you go to that place…as much as you hate it, you’ll experience so much growth, so much vitality, such intensified consciousness that you’ll want to keep coming back.

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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