Most of us treat failure as a verdict. We try something, it doesn’t work, and we quietly conclude: I guess I can’t do that. Then we file it away and, often without noticing, start avoiding anything that might produce the same feeling again.

Mike Avila wants you to know that the verdict is wrong and that the belief behind it is the thing actually holding you back.

Fixed vs. growth: the belief under the belief

Mike leans on the work of psychologist Carol Dweck, who coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset and his own life is a case study in the difference.

A fixed mindset says your abilities, talents, and intelligence are set at birth. You can either do something or you can’t. When a person with this mindset hits failure, they read it as proof: see, I’m just not good at this. They take setbacks hard, and to avoid that pain they start avoiding challenges sometimes even things that genuinely matter to them.

A growth mindset says the opposite: your abilities can be developed through learning, effort, and determination. Failure isn’t a verdict it’s part of the process. Getting beaten is a step on the journey, not a statement about your worth.

Dweck’s research found this isn’t just feel-good talk. A growth mindset is linked to greater motivation, more resilience, and more success across education, career, and even relationships. The people who don’t get thrown off course by setbacks tend to be the ones who never saw those setbacks as final in the first place.

How Mike lives it

Mike’s whole athletic philosophy is a growth mindset in action. He didn’t just tolerate getting beaten he chose it.

When he got into motocross after high school, the obvious move was to enter as a beginner. Instead, he signed up for the expert class. He watched those riders and knew immediately they’d kick his butt and that was exactly the point. He wanted to race people better than him, because racing at his own level would never make him better. Did he crash a lot? Constantly. But getting beaten regularly by superior riders turned him into a strong racer who finished in the top five. “Not bad,” as he puts it, “for an undercover novice.”

He applied the same logic to wrestling, seeking out tougher opponents on purpose. Every beating was tuition. He was paying to learn.

Reframing failure in real life

You don’t have to strap on a helmet to use this. The reframe works on ordinary setbacks the ones at work, in relationships, and around money that quietly convince us to stop trying.

Here’s Mike’s move, and it’s simple enough to use today. When something goes wrong, don’t say you lost or that you’re a failure. Say you got beaten by a circumstance, a person, or life in general. That framing keeps the door open. A loss feels permanent. Getting beaten just means the match isn’t over.

Then look for the lesson, because it’s almost always there. Every time you get beat is a chance to learn and come back stronger. And the fear that keeps so many people from even trying the fear of looking foolish, of confirming their worst suspicion about themselves loses its grip once you stop treating failure as a character flaw and start treating it as feedback.

The mindset is a choice, too

Maybe you read the description of the fixed mindset and winced a little in recognition. That’s okay. Dweck’s own research found that people can change the way they think and Mike is living proof that mindset is trainable. He wasn’t born knowing how to turn a broken neck into a comeback. He built that capacity one reframe, one “Not Today,” at a time.

So the next time failure hands you its verdict, don’t accept the sentence. You didn’t lose. You got beaten. And getting beaten, as Mike will happily tell you, is often the best thing that can happen to someone who refuses to quit.

Mike digs into reframing failure, the fear that comes with it, and how to build a growth mindset in The Secret to Never Giving Up. If failure has been calling the shots in your life, this is where you take the wheel back.