Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
—Albert Einstein
We all take failure very personally. Whether a failure in a relationship, a failure to find employment, a failure to make a project work, or a failure to achieve a grade on a paper—Failure feels personal. But feelings aren’t the same thing as truth. Failure is part of life, and it is a useful and healthy part of life. It might not feel like it at the time, but it is through failure that we improve and grow. It is through failure that we learn more than through success. We rarely learn from getting things right, even if them being right was a result of luck rather than design, and we were just lucky it didn’t go wrong. So what does that mean? Failure helps us grow. Failure is THE key to growth. If you are failing often that is because the road you are traveling requires you to grow and not be superficial. The circumstances you are in require you to be resilient, to have deep roots like an oak tree, not weedy roots that can be easily pulled up.
If something goes right, we rarely sit down and count the cost of success and wonder whether it was worth it. But businesses and individuals usually count the cost of failure. Reflect for a moment the times in your life when you have learnt the most about yourself, about your strengths, about something that has been life defining. I am fairly certain that most of those moments were not where you were first crossing the finish line or where you were being awarded the gold star, but instead, you most life-defining moments were those in the midst of failure, when it didn’t go your way. I once listened to Tim Smit, the founder of the Eden Project in the UK, explain that it is only on when your nose is so close to the brick wall that you feel you are going to hit it that you spot the slim sliver of light, the crack in the wall that allows you to move forward. Failure doesn’t stop you from progressing. It might be messy and there may be consequences that you have to work through, but you don’t stop moving forward because of it. Failure is a master teacher, and in a place of failure we become excellent students.
Failure Means You Are Looking for Opportunities
When I started my first business as a novice entrepreneur, a mentor told me that if I did not make any mistakes I was not doing enough. It seems like a weird piece of business advice to be told to make mistakes, but how else will I learn what works, and what doesn’t work for my business. We learn early on, even before we leave kindergarten, that failure is something to be avoided and it is something we are taught through a process of cultural osmosis, a societal norm to divert from anything that leads to an unwanted outcome. These contrast sharply with our instincts as children, which are to give things a whirl; imagine what would happen if no one dared make a mistake as a toddler—how would we ever learn to walk, talk, or be independent if we didn’t embrace failure as infants? But, as we grow older, we are taught that failure is something to be ashamed of, that it has bad consequences, and at an extreme level, something to be afraid of. Throwing caution to the wind is in some way irresponsible and threatening. Which is a shame because when failure comes, we are ill equipped to deal with it. Embracing failure, however, is an essential part of growing up. We must get to the point where we are secure enough in ourselves that we understand that we are not the failure when things don’t work out, but by not trying to avoid failing and actively trying to learn from failure when it happens enables us to grow as a person, in wisdom and in understanding.
Failure Isn’t Because We Chose the Bad Decision
Who can say whether a choice is good or bad? At the time of making a choice, you make the best choice you can based upon the information you have available at the time. I can’t imagine when faced with a decision you stand there and go “Oh that decision is really bad I’ll chose that option.” In my mind, a decision becomes a mistake only that we have more information than we did at the time of making the decision, which renders the decision we made a poor choice. The only mistake you can really make is not to learn from your mistakes. Therefore, all those mistakes you’ve made, you’ve learnt from, so they weren’t really mistakes, but rather opportunities for development. On the same point, we can sometimes feel that if a decision turns out to be a mistake that we have missed out on a future that we hoped for. What could have been isn’t the same as what should have been. Did I want my life to include nearly losing our house and what seemed like years of financial troubles? No, but it has shaped my thinking, and given me perspective. It has rounded off my sharp edges and softened me. Did I want to fail in business? No, part of my identity has always been that of being a ‘successful business woman,’ but failure has helped make me less fearful, it has made me trust that I can operate without a plan, it has given me fortitude which means I can move forward even when it feels like the road is crumbling at my feet. It turns out that you are who you are meant to be because of those brick walls you hit, not despite of them. They make you, you. I am an author because my business failed. I am living in purposeful endeavor because of my brick walls. You may lose a potential opportunity, and failure means you might take a circular route to ’get there’ but you’ll also find (as I am now) that the experience that you gain through failure will speed things up at the right time, so when the time comes to fulfilling your purpose, things will happen really quickly.
You Might Be a Deluded Megalomaniac
I sometimes hear people who are experiencing failure get out the whip to flog themselves over how they put themselves in this position. You cannot put yourself in a position of failure. If you even think for a minute you can possibly control all the forces and factors that cause the wind to blow this way or that, then you are either beating yourself up unnecessarily or a deluded megalomaniac. Someone close to me died in a car crash because of eight factors, any one of which had been a millimeter one way, a second the other, or slightly different and he would be alive today. Is it his fault he died? No. It was just a combination of things that led to his death. Stuff happens. Your position is not simply because you did X or Y. It’s because stuff happens. This isn’t about abdicating responsibility. If you are caught speeding when driving a car, you shouldn’t have been speeding, but equally, what control did you have about where the speed camera or cop car was. None. You got caught speeding not just because you thought you could get away with, but also because, on that day, you couldn’t get with it, because the police decided on that day, on that road, in that moment to set up a speed trap. Learn from your part in what led to failure, but don’t act like you are master of the universe and your current situation is entirely within your power. Our best efforts can succeed or fail, not simply because we are the best or fail to be our best but because life sometimes throws us lemons and you know what they say about what you do if life throws you lemons, you make lemonade.
Weighing the Likelihood of Failure
An HR Director once told me that he thought everyone should be sacked from a job at least twice. It teaches you humility but also tenacity, and once you’ve been sacked a couple of times and survived, you stop worrying about being sacked and can do your job fearlessly and without compromising your values. Quite often, when I develop people and we discuss the dreams for their lives, there is nervousness about pursuing what they are passionate about because it might not work out. It is at this point that I bring out the Dr. Pepper question—“What is the worst that can happen?” For the majority of people, the decisions we make are inconsequential. No one is going to die, the world is not going to end, and life will carry on. If the failure is going to leave you no worse off than you are now, then the choice to take the risk becomes negligible.
When I made the decision to become self-employed, I was nervous about the financial consequences of removing the security of a regular salary and what might happen if I didn’t get enough work. I had to face the fear that we could lose everything, we might not be able to pay our bills, we might not be able to pay our mortgage, and eventually we might lose our house. But should the worst happen, my children were not going to be homeless, they would have food in their bellies, clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet. My husband would stand with me and my marriage was strong with good friends and family around us. So, in making the decision to give up the day job, the worst that could happen is that we would lose our material wealth. But, equally, should things work out I might spend my life doing a job that I love and represent who I am, fulfilled and happy. As it turns out, I have experienced both. No quite losing the house, but certainly going through a period of time when an eviction notice was weeks away from being served. Not knowing what we were going to feed the kids and certainly not earning enough. We nearly experienced the worst. It wasn’t a great time, and I hope I never have to experience it again. But we survived, and came out of the process stronger, fitter, and better than we were going in. Today, I am living the dream; I have secure, regular work in the diary for the next eighteen months. My income is not only better, but it is more secure now, than it was when I was working in corporate life with a three-month notice period. If you fail, the failure is only for today; it is not forever. Walking through failure might take time, and it might be really tough, but you will walk past it. Keeping going, believing that it will turn out all right in the end is what makes us human and ultimately leads to success. Remember other people will relay to you their successes, the fruit of their failure. But we don’t talk about the moments when it got hairy and when it didn’t quite go according to plan. We are presented stories of success that they happened cleanly in line with a plan. But every success story has failure in its history. Therefore, I can only conclude that giving up on yourself, on the people around you, and on pursuing your dreams and purpose is the only real failure in life.
Manage Your Career Tool #13 – Reframing Failure
Bouncing back from failure doesn’t have to be an anxiety-ridden process. Resilience is a skill that can be learnt, and will enable you to cope when things inevitably go wrong. Resilience enables you to have the courage to ask questions about yourself, even if doing so means having to face up to some difficult truths. It is having the ability to think in a situation to understand what is best for you while balancing the need to keep relationships healthy and knowing the difference between right and wrong. Resilience enables you to take hold of a problem, develop creative solutions, and be resourceful in implement plans to overcome, all while maintaining humor and integrity. Reframing failure requires resilience; it means:
- Being comfortable with being uncomfortable when reviewing difficult issues
- Not allowing failure to destroy our self-worth
- Dealing with the situation as best we can, in that moment
- Choosing to have power over our failure, by taking a step back and learning from it, failure
There are four tasks in this exercise:
- Identify mistakes
- Think about the negative results
- Think about the positive results
- Think about what you have learned
When completing this exercise, you may find that as you tackle some of the tasks it is challenging revisiting difficult situations. I encourage you to be brave and keep in mind what it means to be resilient. Get into the habit of learning from mistakes, that way you can build toward success.
Think back to those moments in your life where you have experienced a situation where you have failed spectacularly. Choose those occasions where you really messed up. No one else has to see your response to what is written. This is just you, reviewing yourself. There is no judgment, so please be as honest as possible.
Task 2 – What Were the Negative Results?
For each of the failure occasions that you identified in Task 1, reflect on all the negative consequences that arose as a result of the situation. We are covering these first, because they are the things that we tend to focus on when we fail. In the space below, fill in the Negative Results.
Task 3 – What Were the Positive Results?
Now the tricky bit; for each experience of failure that you wrote down in Task 1, what were the positive results that came out of that experience? It may be that for some mistakes you struggle to think of anything good that came out of it, so perhaps consider how, in relation to your life in general, things changed for the better. Capture these Positive Results in the space below.
Lastly, for each experience of failure you listed in Task 1, consider what it was that you may have learned from your experience. Did you demonstrate resilience, or did the experience develop your knowledge and understanding about a particular situation or person. Did the experience teach you to do something differently or better, the next time? What did the experience teach you about yourself? Write what you learned in the space below: