Yesterday I mentioned a little phrase that Tiger Woods made during an interview after his victory at The Masters. In the middle of a longer reply he offered us this bit of gold, “I applied what I learned.” If you have ever applied what you have learned, then you simultaneously did something else. You acknowledged and quit doing something else. This is precisely why applying what you learn is so difficult. For whatever reason many of us have a fear of making mistakes. All of us want to hit the proverbial golf ball 325 yards down the middle of the fairway every time. But, that performance standard is unrealistic. Often we are going to hook it out of bounds, or push it further right than east. The key to being able to “apply what you learn” is to understand that just because an attempt failed doesn’t mean you failed. If we can just own that sentiment–that a failed try doesn’t mean we are a failure–then we are free to try again and again until it works. Kill your desire for “first try perfection “and instead adopt the much more robust attitude of “try, learn, try again.”