"Mandatory Massive Failure"
June 7, 2025
“Mandatory Massive Failure”
It took me several years to realize that “mandatory massive failure” is essential to reach high levels of success in life. Several of my earliest jobs included being dishwasher for Rustler Steak House in Baltimore Maryland followed my processing high school senior photographs in a completely dark room for eight hours a day.
What followed was working for a few years in retail then investing decades in the financial services industry. While working in the financial services industry I was helping to lead a non-profit organization. Each of those positions, looking back at them, required me to be willing to fail over and over and over again in order to become really good at what I was doing at the time.
This concept of “mandatory massive failure” is part of everyone who has reach high levels of success…no matter their career or life path. “Obsession” is one of the words that very successful people have used when describing their incredible desire to reach their goals in life.
Comedian Jimmy Fallon said, "I believe that rejection is a blessing because it's the universe's way of telling you that there's something better out there and sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection."
Entrepreneur and investor said Naval Ravikant said, “The people who succeed are irrationally passionate about something.”
The majority of people, I have discovered over many decades, do not try enough times to reach a higher level in life. In other words, they give up long before they even get close to achieving their goals. They work on some of their goals when they “have time” or when they “feel like it.”
I see it every-single-day, in so many environments, when people have not developed the consistent habit of making enough attempts to almost guarantee success at some point in the future. This is a consistent pattern of everyone throughout history who has “made it” in life.
Everyone who has “made it” in life works harder and smarter than 99% of everyone else around them and works on themselves, and are consistently chasing their goals, while being rejected many more times than they succeed.
Businessman Tim Grover said, “Interested people watch obsessed people change the world.”
In my career and life I was rejected many thousands of times and is/was incredibly painful and I hated it every-single-second and wanted to end everything more times than I can count.
The distractions, that you allow to dictate your life, are enemies for you and they must be defeated consistently because they postpone everything in your life.
The hourly habits and some of the people in my life would not let me quit. The intentional habits, I maintained, carried me through my darkest days. It was almost an “out-of-body-experience” for me because there have been many times when my “muscle memory” kicked in that enables me to do what I needed to do when every cell in my body wanted to quit and give up…forever.
Being “comfortable” in life is not your friend.
Most of my success, including reaching tens of millions of people around the world, boils down to be massive determination to try to impact as many people as possible and knowing that if I gave up there might be a lot of people who would never reach their best in life because they did not have the information that I was determined to share with them that is life-changing.
Showing up, especially when you don’t feel like showing up, is essential to winning.
Mandatory Massive Failure is essential in life while knowing most people cannot even imagine understanding that they must fail thousands of times before they even come close to some level of success.
I Believe in YOU!
John W. Carver, LUTCF
john@johnwcarver.com