Give Failure Its Due
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
—Auguste Rodin
You started a company and it went belly up. You launched a new product and not only did it fail to sell, customers actually hated it. You got fired. What happens when you dare to disrupt yourself and then your progress flatlines—or you’re tossed off the curve altogether? What then?
There’s the plucky Henry Ford quotation, which, admittedly, I have used: “Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.” Since Ford was eventually wildly successful, this aphorism does reassure me, but it also jauntily skips over the emotional, psychological, and practical complexity of failure. My failures range from the mundane—not making cheerleader my junior year of high school, for example—to the devastating setbacks of being fired and backing a business that imploded. No matter how many chirpy quotes I may tweet out, when I fail my initial response is despondency, pessimism, and the urge to relocate to another city because I can never show my face in public. Ever. Again. I tend to identify with Margery Eldredge Howell, who said: “There’s dignity in suffering, nobility in pain, but failure is a salted wound that burns and burns again.”
Why We Detest Failure
Our abhorrence of and shrinking from failure typically start when we are children. Researchers Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller conducted a study that examined how different kinds of praise would affect fifth graders. The children were given three sets of problems. After the first set, the researchers praised half the students for performance (“You must be really smart!”), and the other half for effort (“You must have worked really hard!”). The second set of problems was so difficult that most of the children didn’t even get one correct answer. Then they were given a third set of problems—as easy as the first set—to see how the intervening failure would affect their performance.
Dweck and Mueller discovered that the children praised for their intelligence did roughly 25 percent worse on the final set of problems compared to the first, and were likely to blame their performance on a lack of ability. Consequently, they enjoyed working on the problems less and gave up sooner. Children praised for effort performed roughly 25 percent better than on the first set, blamed their difficulty on not trying hard enough, persisted longer, and enjoyed the experience.1
If you are reading this book, you were probably a smart kid, and smart kids often create an identity based on their achievements. According to the research of social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, “people with above-average aptitudes often judge their abilities not only more harshly, but fundamentally differently, than others do, especially in Western cultures. Gifted children grow up to be more vulnerable and less confident when they should be the most confident . . . .” Halvorson continues, “the kind of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children has a major impact on the implicit beliefs we develop about our abilities—including whether we see them as innate and unchangeable, or as capable of developing through effort and practice. This is especially true for women. Because young girls are more likely to sit still and pay attention, they are more likely to be praised for performance. In fact, straight-A girls were the most likely to throw in the towel when confronted with a difficult problem.”2 Whether you are a woman or a man, if you perceive your smartness, cleverness, and success as an innate part of your identity, when you fail, the failure becomes a referendum on you.
There are neurochemical reasons we hate failure, too. Organizational anthropologist Judith E. Glaser explains, “Whenever we are in a tense situation or meeting and feel that we are losing ground, our body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself—in this case from the shame and loss of power associated with being wrong. In terms of neurochemistry, our brain is being hijacked.” In these high-stress situations, says Glaser, “the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain, executive functions that help us manage the gaps between expectations and reality shut down, and the amygdala, our instinctive brain takes over. When the amygdala, or lizard brain, is in charge, we operate in fight or flight mode, with the default response being to fight or continue arguing for what we believe.”3 Fighting feels better than failing. “When you argue and win,” explains Glaser, “Your brain floods with adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. So the next time you are in a tense situation, you argue again. And become addicted to being right.” If you’re addicted to being right, you can’t exactly partake in the kind of humble inquiry that’s an essential part of growth. Rather than fight it or flee it, we must learn to face failure. As Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar writes, “Fear of failure, resulting from often unrealistic and perfectionist demands [is] one of the key detractors from learning, leading to lack of creativity and procrastination. Learn to fail or fail to learn.”4
When you disrupt, you are walking into the unknown, exposing yourself to the risk of failure. While exploring unfamiliar territory, you are almost certainly going to misstep. Some mistakes will be inconsequential, leading to delays or inconveniences. Others will be gigantic, earth-shattering failures that will make you doubt your choices or even doubt yourself. As I have grappled with my own failures, and as I have watched others dealing with setbacks, I have observed several responses that seem to ameliorate failure, transforming it into a stepping-stone to future success.
Recognize That It’s Not a Matter of If, but When
A few years ago, I walked into a recording studio for the first time. The building exterior was nondescript. Inside, there were shelves of musical instruments, banks of recording equipment, and a grand piano. I was there to play the piano for my friend Macy Robison’s cabaret-style recital “Children Will Listen.” We were recording in advance of her performances in a nationwide series of inspirational events called Time Out for Women. I was “pinch-myself” thrilled.
As I entered the studio, I was eager but relaxed. My calm was short-lived. Within minutes of meeting the producer and audio engineer, the perfectionist in my head started tearing down my confidence—I haven’t played piano seriously since college. Why didn’t they hire a professional pianist? They are going to think I’m lousy. I started to play, and I played badly. The more mistakes I made, the more frazzled I became. I hadn’t approached this experience acknowledging that it was not a matter of if I make a mistake, but when.
At lunch, Macy advised me to figuratively wave to my mistakes as I would to a casual acquaintance, not paying them too much mind, and to focus on how quickly I could recover. I relaxed. The mistakes began to decrease, and we ended up with a recording we were happy with.
I learned an important lesson in that recording studio. If you want failure to be anything but emotionally catastrophic, you need to plan to fail. Part of that plan, in addition to a focus on recovery time, is surrounding yourself with stakeholders, like Macy, who are sufficiently invested in you that they’ll stick with you even through a professional face-plant.
A good example of this is Riot Games, creator of the massively popular online game League of Legends. The gaming community is a tight-knit world, and gamers’ loyalties can shift quickly as they lose patience with technical or creative failures in their favorite games. Riot has chosen to address its failures by communicating directly with its users and using humor, often of a self-deprecating variety. According to Chris McArthur, a senior game developer at Riot, “The overall effect ends up giving us a much more human face and making us feel more authentic to our players. Yes, you may get pissed off at the mistakes your friend makes sometimes, but he is still your friend.”
By not taking itself too seriously, Riot Games has generated fan empathy and fidelity. This attitude of openness to criticism and dialogue around failure has had an effect on Riot’s internal culture as well. “We have no ‘yes men’ here,” says McArthur. “Employees are constantly challenging their managers’ decisions, calling out failures, challenging convention, and having those difficult conversations. Failure is something that people see happening and see discussed, so is no longer feared. But instead, it’s seen as an opportunity to learn something and improve.”
Redefine Success
We live in a world where being anything less than the best is tantamount to failure. Figures from the sports and business arenas seem uniquely adept at coining derogatory quotes about not winning. Second place is the first place loser,” said NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt. Former Major League Baseball executive Gabe Paul opined, “There is no such thing as second place.” If this is really what we believe to be true, most of us are 99.9 percent failures and .1 percent winners.
An unusual illustration of this false paradigm comes from a 2009 New York Times article called “The No-Stats All-Star” about Shane Battier, formerly of the NBA championship team Miami Heat. Battier was considered by many inside the NBA as, at best, a replaceable cog in the machine of his team. When you google Battier you get lots of shots of the back of his head, seemingly mucking up the shot as the camera tries to focus on all-stars like Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant.
Interestingly, nearly every team he played on had the magical ability to win. When he was on the court, his teammates got better, and his opponents got worse. It was said, “Battier seems to help the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways, with a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. They call him Lego, because when he’s on the court, all the pieces fit together.”5 Battier’s definitive strength of quietly assisting his team wasn’t a power position, so despite his amazing talent he wasn’t thought of as an “all-star.” If you aren’t putting points up on the board, racing up the curve, or leaping from one tall curve to the next, by Western cultural norms, you are second best, a polite euphemism for “loser.”
Acknowledge and Share Sadness
When I fail, I am mortified, but I am also heartbroken. I have envisioned a future in which I would achieve a goal, and perhaps be hailed as the conquering hero. And then I didn’t. And I wasn’t. I’ve learned it is important to grieve.6
It has been said by a number of psychologists who study recovery from trauma that mourning without empathy leads to madness. The person who suffers loss must be able to give testimony to someone as a way of working through and learning from this loss. We often think of loss of a marriage or a loved one, but there is also the loss we feel when a professional dream—even a small one—is dashed. Author Sue Monk Kidd said, “There’s no pain on earth that doesn’t crave a benevolent witness.” So don’t hide your failures, much as you may want to bury them deep in the earth where they will never be seen. Acknowledge them and share them with someone you trust.
Jettison Shame
If you let a failure become a referendum on you, the millstone of shame will drown you and your dreams. Shame and vulnerability expert Dr. Brené Brown hammers this idea home. In professional sports, the military, or corporate life, “When the ethos is ‘kill or be killed,’ ‘control or be controlled,’ failure is tantamount to ‘be killed.’”7 Being perceived as weak elicits tremendous shame. I’ve seen this play out in my life. I once bombed a speech: by the time I finished, I was perspiring so much it looked as if I’d just run three miles. The job I was fired from? I wondered if I would ever recover. The business I fronted that went belly up? I felt I should have read the situation better and made different choices. How could I claim to be a savvy investor? We frequently applaud failure in theory, but the dirty little secret is that it makes all of us feel at least a little ashamed.
Any dishonor we feel when we fail must be deep-sixed, labeled as the detritus that it is. If it isn’t, we may never again speak in public, throw ourselves into new job, or invest in another company.
Failure itself doesn’t limit dreaming and personal innovation—shame does. Once we pull shame out of the equation, we eliminate the drag and gain the lift we need to accelerate back into daring.
Learn from It
As we are faced with interim failures in our personal innovation process, the narrative we construct is key. It’s not just about learning lessons along the way. If we want an end-game success, it’s about learning the right kind of lesson. The Lean Startup author Eric Ries describes this as validated learning, in which you ask: What valuable truth did you discover about your present and future prospects by failing?8
Nate Quigley is an entrepreneur who had an idea for a Facebook-esque social media service, but with a twist—he created FolkStory, a shared family journal. The platform launched, and it wasn’t a hit. So the team stepped back, listened to feedback, and came up with JustFamily, a cloud-based family photo library. This also failed to find an audience. Now in a third iteration, JustFamily has become Chatbooks, a service that lets users automatically create photo books from the moments they share in social networks and through text conversations. Quigley says: “We blindly charged in with the certainty of being right, and then failed. We regrouped, and listened a lot more carefully the second time. But we failed again. We had to restart once more, this time 100 percent focused on talking to target users about what they very specifically wanted. We made prototypes, showed them to our target users, and iterated based on their reactions until we had a better prototype. It’s like we were the ‘what not to do’ case study of a Lean Start-up, and on our third swing, we followed the Lean instruction manual as carefully as we could, out of necessity, desperation, and related humility.”
On a personal note, when I bombed that speech, I discovered when I stood behind a podium it became a barrier that made the speech about me personally, which was nerve wracking. I learned that when I moved away from the podium, I could have a conversation with and connect to my audience. My takeaway from the failed business? Vetting prospective partners is vital, as are clear rules of engagement. “Learning is the essential unit of progress for start-ups,”9 says Eric Ries. Learning, I would argue, is also a basic unit of progress for dreaming and disrupting. Rather than take failure as a message that you or your ideas are bad or wrong, ask: What have I learned that I didn’t know before? How can I apply that knowledge to propel my journey up the learning curve of disruption?
One lesson you might learn from failure is that you are on the wrong curve for you. Famed football coach Vince Lombardi said, “Winners never quit.” Marketing guru Seth Godin countered with, “Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”
Gregory Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and Carsten Wrosch, associate professor of psychology at Concordia University, have conducted a number of studies on quitting, or disengaging from one’s goals.10 They found that people who didn’t give up on goals that were not the right goals for them showed increased levels of the inflammatory molecule C-reactive protein. This protein is linked to such health problems as heart disease, diabetes, and early aging in adults. Further, according to Kathleen D. Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, “if you are pursuing a goal that is constantly frustrating, you will be less successful in goal attainment in other areas of life.” In these instances, quitting, or finding a new curve, may be the smart choice. It’s important to dream, and it’s important to know when to find a new dream.
Advice for the Still Risk Averse
If you’re struggling to understand why you aren’t taking as much risk as you’d like, consider a technique developed by car manufacturer Toyota called the “five whys.”11 This is a technique that explores the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem, with the goal of determining the initiating cause of failure. The “five” derives from empirical observation of the number of iterations needed to resolve a problem. While this technique is typically used after product failures to get to the root of a problem, it can also be used to understand why you failed when you took the risk or why you have failed to launch into something new.
For example, a commenter named Ramesh shared, in the comments section of one of my Harvard Business Review essays, that after two decades in the IT industry he was bored and wondering what to do next. But he couldn’t seem to muster up the will to try something new. Why? Financial security (or the lack thereof) was his initial answer. But then he noted that his net worth was such that he could live without a paycheck for ten years. Still, he was unable to take the risk of switching jobs. He realized that the right question wasn’t, “Can I try something new?” but rather, “Why won’t I?” Before you can get to the right answer, you have to ask the right question. And then you need to dig deeper and deeper, until you get to the root cause. If you were to apply the five whys to Ramesh’s situation, here’s what the process would look like:
“I have enough money to quit, but I don’t.”
Why #1? “I don’t know what I would do next.”
Why #2? “I don’t know what I like to do.”
Why #3? “I am always working.”
Why #4? “Working is what I know how to do.”
Why #5? “My job is my identity.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Figuring out a new identity can be one of scariest things you’ll do. But once you’ve jumped off one S-curve cliff, you can jump off another.
If this still sounds uncomfortable, recall the hugely successful people who have suffered through colossal failures. Look at Steve Jobs, iconic founder of Apple, always unveiling the next insanely great product; but he was also the despairing founder curled into a fetal position sobbing on a couch in an unfurnished house when the Apple board fired him in 1985. Or think of J.K. Rowling, billionaire author of the Harry Potter books: just a few years after graduating from university, her marriage failed and she was jobless with a dependent child, diagnosed with clinical depression and contemplating suicide. She would later write, “rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
Dave McClure, Silicon Valley super angel and founder of 500 Startups, also experienced plenty of failure. He skipped two grades in high school and was expected to do great things, but then didn’t. He bounced around as a programmer, became an entrepreneur, and barely escaped bankruptcy several times. He applied to Stanford Business School and didn’t get in. He worked at PayPal under several different bosses who didn’t know what to do with him. But then he started to invest. He realized he was pretty good at picking winners like Mint.com and SlideShare, and he eventually cobbled together 500 Startups with the backing of Silicon Valley’s most revered venture capitalists. He is today one of the most prominent super angels in the world.
Whether we see an experience as a failure or a success is ultimately a choice. In late 2014, I was giving a speech to an audience of 2,500 in Portland, Oregon. One of the subthemes of the speech was to persuade the audience to place as much value on feminine characteristics (relationships) as on the masculine (power and achievement), as outlined by Jungian psychology.
Within the first thirty seconds of beginning my speech, I went blank. The technical term is I went up, as in, the ideas sailed up and out of my head. Rattled, I stopped and said to the 2,500 people, “I forgot what I was going to say, just a moment.” To my surprise, a woman in the audience shouted, “We love you, Whitney. You can do it.” With her spontaneous act of kindness, my memory came back, and I felt the most connected I’ve ever felt to an audience. Rather than a monologue, that speech was a dialogue. This interplay with the audience moved from laughter to sighs to tears—it was an animated conversation.
Later that day, my agent asked me how it went. Based on the power and achievement metrics (how well I stuck to the script, for example) it was my worst speech ever. I had never before forgotten what I had rehearsed and wanted to say. If I measured the speech by metrics that gauge how connected I felt to my audience, it was the best speech I’d ever given.
I had to make a choice.
Did I really believe my own rhetoric about connection rivaling, even trumping, perfection, in certain situations?
Best or worst?
I hesitated. But ultimately, I choose to see the speech in Portland as my best.
I often hear it said that failure is not an option. I agree. Not because failure isn’t permissible. It is. Failure is inevitable and sometimes even requisite. Poet John Milton said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” I think this is also true with success and failure. Just as the mind can make of every success a failure, in every failure there can be a success. As you disrupt yourself and sometimes struggle up the steep slope of a new learning curve, remember that failure may be your companion at times. If you welcome failure as a guide and teacher, you’re more likely to find your way to success.