From ‘I Failed’ to ‘I’m a Failure’—And the One Habit That Reversed 15 Years of Stuck
Stop Setting Goals. Start Building Your Character Class
Dread fills you as the alarm screeches.
Another day has started. Reality crashes down on you like a piano dropped from a high rise.
Your chest tightens. You want to retreat under the covers, hoping the world will leave you alone for just one more hour.
Things started well—you chased your dreams. Mapped out a success journey. Created a vision statement.
You floated on a dopamine-fueled high for days or weeks. But somewhere along the line, that initial momentum quickly reversed, dragging you under the waves, paralyzing your progress.
Here’s the frustrating part—you did everything right! You set SMART goals, dreamed big, [insert common guru advice here…]
It’s easy to fixate on planning. For many of us, it’s even fun.
I love filling pages with outlines and building planners. My hard drive is a graveyard of good intentions that suffocated as I failed to act.
The worst part? Those gravestones became mental weights, dragging me down daily.
Failure After Failure
Failure has inertia.
Failure compounds, resulting in a downward spiral that feels impossible to claw your way out of.
Newton’s First Law of Motion (inertia) states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion at the same speed and direction until acted upon by an external force.
Newton said objects resist change. People do too. Especially with a trajectory of failure or success.
This is why there’s a billion-dollar industry built around helping people change. Lasting change is hard to achieve without proper implementation, even when you crave it.
This person’s struggles caught my attention:
Repeated failure reprograms you. You go from “I failed” to “I’m a failure.”
I’ve been there many times. The losses keep piling up. Nothing works out despite you pouring your heart and soul into the project.
Another described it as:
How many can relate?
These compounded failures have sunk into our core, creating a negativity monster.
It whispers in your ear every time you try:
“Why bother?”
“You’ll fail again”
“You aren’t good enough”
Failure starts as a pebble. But setbacks quickly compound—until you’re chased by a boulder of past defeats.
The monster didn’t push it, but it constantly says you’ll never outrun it.
How do you stop it?
Better—how do we roll it the other direction?
Core Habits
Every video game starts the same: zero skill, no gear, and a boss you’re not remotely ready to face.
You must undergo a hero’s quest—building your skills from the ground up.
A skill tree maps out your progress from the fundamentals to the ones that truly matter. But no matter how much you desire the advanced stuff, you must first unlock the basics.
Life is no different.
Journaling, making your bed, and daily walks are core skills that unlock a broad array of other possibilities.
Most people skip these core skills just like they skip video game tutorials. They want the action. A taste of success. To defeat of the final boss.
This is why 92% of people never achieve their goals—they strain against boulders instead of starting with pebbles.
Success comes from starting small but intentionally.
Start with “keystone habits”—small routines that break apart the boulders of failure, creating momentum in a new direction.
They’re inertia-busters. Confidence-builders. Identity-shifters.
Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.
Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit
They’re beginner-level habits. Nothing impressive.
What matters is progress. Change.
The identity shift.
A way to say:
“I’m not a failure.”
“I get knocked down…but I get up again.”
New Inertia
I wasn’t a writer.
I’d written papers in school, even a thesis. But those were anomalies.
I struggled.
Most of my creative content came from bullet points—brainstorms I turned into video. It was efficient. Comfortable. Safe.
But life changed. I wanted to write more.
I had momentum, but it was in the wrong direction.
I set a goal of writing each morning. It didn’t matter what I wrote—only that I wrote.
Some days it was freewriting, others journaling, a thoughtful social media post, a note in my Obsidian vault, or a single sentence on my article. The goal is consistency, not big results, for a core habit.
Initially, writing was torture. I’d stare at a blank screen for hours. Failure. Failure. Success. Failure. Success.
But I kept showing up.
It took time, but now I have a new inertia—I write daily without thinking about it.
Writing is no longer something I do; it’s something I am.
I’m a writer.
That’s the power of a core habit. It’s not just a behavior change, it’s a rewiring of your identity.
Start small, whether you’re battling a negativity monster or shifting to a new path.
Pick one habit at the bottom of your skill tree.
Then show up. Every day.
Build One Core Habit
Every RPG starts with a choice:
Knight. Mage. Archer.
Class selection shapes your gameplay and skill tree branches you pursue. Skills and identity are intertwined. When aligned, your character flourishes.
Why?
Because identity drives action.
Real life works the same way.
To defeat the negativity monster, define your future self.
Failure to define that will leave you stuck chasing side quests. Constantly switching paths. Changing tools. Starting over.
This is why most people fail—they focus on goals without reshaping identity.
Consider weight loss attempts: Set a goal. Eat unrealistically for months. Achieve goal.
A year later, you’re back at the same weight—or heavier.
Goal-setting without identity change is a recipe for failure.
Want lasting change? Decide: I’m the kind of person who eats to nourish, not to indulge. Study what (and how) that person eats daily. Adopt those patterns.
Here’s how to get started:
1. Identify the type of person you want to be
This is your character selection screen.
The sky’s the limit. Who will you be in three years?
Consider your current struggles and goals:
Struggle with weight → become a person who nourishes your body with intent and moves daily to stay strong, energized, and focused.
Cluttered house → become someone who puts things back and clears space daily to create peace in your home.
Credit card debt → become someone who tracks every dollar and spends intentionally, not impulsively.
Shifting from goals to identity allows momentum to build. The pebble keeps rolling, picking up mass until it becomes an unstoppable boulder; there’s no hard stop after meeting your objective.
If you struggle to convert your goal into an identity, use this prompt in ChatGPT or another AI model:
I have a goal, but I want to transform it into an identity statement to help create lasting change. Here’s my goal:
“[INSERT GOAL HERE]”
Rewrite this goal as an identity-based statement. Instructions: Ignore the result. Focus on the type of person who would naturally achieve this goal.Describe the core habits or behaviors that this person lives out daily.Return the answer as: “I am the kind of person who [habit/behavior].” Example: Goal: “I want to run a marathon.”Identity: “I am the kind of person who runs every day, even when it’s hard.”
2. Identify the daily habits of the person you’re becoming
Skill tree time!
Envision the future. What does a day in the life of the new you look like?
Vividly imagine the details.
Identify daily actions that reinforce your new identity.
My character is a writer impacting the lives of tens of thousands of subscribers. He writes and shares valuable ideas daily, regardless of the audience.
For example:
Waking up early
Spending the first hour of each day writing
Prioritize daily posting over perfection
Reading interesting blogs and books for fresh insights
Now it’s your turn.
List the daily habits of your future self. Go deep. Get detailed.
If you need help, go back to that AI chat you started and ask a follow-up question:
What are the daily habits or routines that make up this person's life?
3. Choose your first quest
Now that you have your list of potential habits, choose your first quest. Choose one habit.
The simpler, the better.
This isn’t about turning your life around. It’s a proof of concept for your new identity. This is about shifting your mindset.
Here’s the criteria for choosing:
Easy to accomplish
Easy to do daily
Reinforces the identity you’re seeking
Here are some examples:
“I’ll walk on the treadmill for 1 minute daily”
“I’ll write one sentence in my journal daily”
“I’ll share one thing I’m grateful for to my spouse”
Don’t skip this tutorial! You need to build confidence. Yes, it’s easy. But that’s the point.
You need a win. You need to build consistency.
This is your grain of sand rolling in the right direction while life is barreling into chaos.
4. Track your wins
Visuals ignite our brains.
We love accomplishment walls. Games capitalize on this with unlockable achievements and progress tracking.
You need a simple system to track your progress.
Print a calendar and mark each successful day with an X. Or use a habit tracking app.
My favorite system is using my Sticky Note Productivity board. Each day, I put my keystone habit on the board and crumple it when I complete it.
Watching my completed notes fill the container gives me joy.
To learn more, read about it here:
Tomorrow Morning
Remember the person who couldn’t get out of bed—drowning in failure, weighed down in a graveyard of good intention?
That person is about to become someone new.
Tomorrow, when your alarm blasts you out of beautiful slumber, you won’t lay there staring at the ceiling wondering if it’s worth crawling out of bed. You’ll have something different.
A single, easy habit waiting for you to crush it.
It could be writing a sentence, taking a short walk, or flossing one tooth.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve started a grain of sand rolling toward your new identity. Remember it will pick up mass daily.
One small win. Then another. Then another.
One day you’ll wake up and realize that the boulder haunting you has reversed direction and is now unstoppable.
Your skill tree starts now. Choose your first quest.
One additional step that can help a declaration of intent.
If you’ve decided to change your life and redefine your identity, drop in the comments who you are becoming and the core habit you are starting today that will get you there!
Let’s encourage each other to grow.
Thanks for taking the time to read!
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