It often feels like everything is so serious — that if you make one mistake, it will all end in disaster. But really everything you do is just a test: an experiment to “see what happens”.

I learned how to feel good in spite of failure when I adopted the “let’s see what happens” mentality. Now, whenever I want to try something new that has an uncertain chance of success, I tell myself it’s an experiment. I assume that whatever I invest in it, I invest it to gather data, and not necessarily to get a return.

For example, I started investing in video courses for my business. In the end, it was a spectacular failure, but I wasn’t particularly worried about it because my experiment was still a success: it proved that my business idea wasn’t a good one. I also learned a lot working on this goal, and that alone was worth it. I’m not sure if I would have taken action if I had told myself that this endeavor absolutely must deliver a positive return.

You can apply the same mentality to every other goal. For example, if you’re afraid that you’ll fail to develop a habit of getting up early, consider it a 30-day experiment to see how waking up early will make you feel and whether you’ll be more productive. When you think of it this way, you ensure from the get-go that no matter how your experiment goes, it’s a success. After all, you aren’t trying to make a permanent change: you only want to test a hypothesis.

Usually, if the experiment goes well, it leads to a permanent change anyway, and that’s the purpose of adopting this different mindset: you’re breaking through the initial resistance by lowering your expectations, and you consequently eliminate the fear of failure.

Every time you make a decision to stick with your principles instead of indulging your weaknesses, you get stronger spiritually. And eventually this spiritual strength becomes a part of your identity. I don’t think of myself as a nonsmoker or “ex-” anything, because smoking and other vices are things I would never do in a million years.

The only way to instill a permanent change is to change your identity. As long as you define yourself by a behavior you want to eliminate, your efforts to change will be in vain because subconsciously, you’ll treat your changes as a temporary situation.

I don’t define myself as a person who doesn’t take drugs — I’ve never done drugs and never plan on doing them. Why would I define myself as a non-drug user?

In essence, that’s what people do when they say they’re ex-smokers or ex-convicts. That’s behind you. Embrace the present and develop a different, positive definition of yourself that will explain who you are and what you do today, not what you’re no longer about or what you’re no longer doing.

As a vegetarian, I don’t think of myself as a person who used to eat meat. I’m a person who eats a plant-based diet. It doesn’t matter how flavorful you tell me this piece of chicken is — I won’t eat it .

Your decision to be self-disciplined has to be equally firm. Don’t define yourself as a person who used to be lazy or lacking discipline. Define yourself as a person who’s doing his or her best to ensure the best future possible. No matter how enticing the temptations are, your self-definition will ensure that you’ll stay away from them.