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Failure is fundamental
Woody Allen once said that he didn’t want to achieve immortality through his work; he wanted to achieve it through not dying. We all feel much the same way about success: that it should be achieved by not failing. Most of us hate failure and spend quite a bit of our lives arranging things so that this doesn’t happen. Sometimes, when others fail we’re tempted to blame them for their stupidity and then go out of our way to avoid them, in case their failure rubs off on to us. Most of us fear failure more than almost anything else. The number 1 fear cited by most people is public speaking, which is, of course, simply the fear of failing in public. Failure feels bad and feels even worse when we think others can see it. Think about the last time you made a big mistake that others witnessed. You can probably already feel the hairs standing up on the back of your neck and the heat of the blush crawling up around your ears, can’t you?
These are deep instincts wired into our very nature and we make them even worse by the way we think about failure. We tend to assume failure happens because someone, somewhere, did something wrong. In fact, failure is often the result of doing something very right: attempting something that you’ve never done before, maybe something that no-one anywhere has ever done before.
As failure is so unpalatable, we spend an enormous amount of time engineering it out of our lives, even attempting to rid it out of society. People’s resultant declining ability to take risks and bounce back when things don’t work is now clearly evident. New companies that have long been the engine of economic innovation and growth are no longer being created as rapidly and people, whose jobs have been made redundant, are not being re-absorbed by the job market. We seem to be frozen, unable to tell whether the light we’re staring into is the actual end of the tunnel or an oncoming train!
There is definitely a better way to do this: by recognising that we simply cannot succeed without experiencing failure first. Perhaps we should stop spending all our energy trying to avoid it? How about we embrace it….willingly?! Even encourage people to fail – by making sure that their failures are learning opportunities, not catastrophes. Unfortunately, schools do little to teach this and this is exactly where it needs to start.
Instead of protecting our kids from failure, teachers (and parents) would do well to encourage them to face it, early and often. Facing the fact that climbing up to lofty heights can often result in the odd broken arm, and that this is OK, will help them overcome their natural fear of failure far more quickly. By reinforcing this message consistently, we will shift the misconception that failure is something to be avoided. In fact, failure is often the best and sometimes the only way to learn. Just as in Judo, we are taught how to fall correctly, when it comes to success, we must learn how to fail well.
Learning to fail well means learning to understand our mistakes, because unless we know where we went wrong, we will never do anything to correct it. Mistakes require, not punishment, but guided correction. This way, we learn to see mistakes as perfectly natural, acceptable and totally in keeping with any evolutionary process. Our past mistakes, however, are simply water under the bridge and we will never do ourselves any good by diving over the rails in an effort to recapture them!
Handle it right, and failure can be the best thing that ever happens to us (though at the time, it may feel like the worst!). You will find concrete ways to train yourself to become much more resilient and it won’t then feel like the worst thing that ever happened to you. You learn to turn every unpleasant setback into an opportunity and to do things you may never ever have had the courage to do before or otherwise. Go on, do something today that scares you just a wee bit, then do something different again tomorrow…..go on, be a devil for once…….you know you want to…. really……..!!