You're going to fail.

The 4 most inspirtional words you will ever read.

I’ve always loved football — not just the spectacle, but the strategy. The momentum shifts. The pressure-packed decisions. The way good teams move forward one play at a time, adapting and adjusting, even when the outcome is uncertain.

The more I’ve studied how people make real decisions — in business, relationships, and everyday life — the more I’ve realized how rare that mindset is outside the game.

In football, no team kneels three times and punts just because something might go wrong. That would be unthinkable. You don’t give up possession without at least trying to advance.

But in real life, we do exactly that. We hesitate. We overanalyze. We sit on ideas and instincts that could create momentum — not because they’re flawed, but because there’s a chance they might not succeed. 

And so we wait. We delay. We disguise fear as caution.

I’ve been as guilty of that as anyone. There have been moments when I knew what play to run — when the path was clear enough, and the upside real — but I let fear take the wheel. I convinced myself to wait for a better time, a more certain signal. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see that the real mistake wasn’t acting too soon. It was not acting at all.

Eventually, I learned something that changed how I operate. Failure is not just inevitable, it’s necessary. You can’t avoid it. And the more cautious your play calls, the less ground you gain.

The goal isn’t to be right every time. The goal is to keep calling smart, informed plays — to put yourself in position to win more than you lose. That’s how you gain ground. That’s how the game is played.

And guess what? We have a clock, too. Life doesn’t grant us unlimited possessions. We’re only given so much time on this field, and every delay is time we’ll never get back.

What’s Likely was built on that principle. Not to eliminate risk, but to clarify it. To show which options give you the best odds of moving forward. It won’t tell you what’s guaranteed to work. It will show you what’s most likely to. And once you have that clarity, your job is to act — even knowing it might not be perfect.

You don’t need to be flawless. You don’t need to be first. You just need to be right a few more times than the people chasing the same thing you are.

And while they’re still trying to figure out the forward pass, we’re running a modern offense.

You’re going to fail. So am I. But when you stop resisting that fact — when you embrace it as part of progress — everything changes.

Because the biggest failure isn’t being wrong. It’s refusing to run the play.

Jacob Brower is the founder and chief strategist of What’s Likely, a decision-support tool that delivers percentage-based forecasts for the most probable path to success. He is also the president of Archer's Bow Media & Marketing and ABM Strategies. Click here to request a free consultation ($75 value).

New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle kneels in the end zone after a brutal hit by Pittsburgh Steelers defenders at Pitt Stadium, Sept. 20, 1964. Bloodied, concussed, and at the tail end of a long career, Tittle had just thrown a pick-six. The Giants lost 27–24. It wasn’t his last game. It wasn’t even his worst. It was just a bad day — and yet he closed his career as one of the most prolific passers in NFL history, later earning enshrinement in Canton’s Hall of Fame. Of the 46,571 men who have ever taken an NFL snap, Tittle ranks among the top 30 — easily the top 1%.