Failure: Our Common Bond
Have you ever thought of failure as something you have in common with every other person boot-scootin’ and boogie’n across this marvelous masterpiece called Earth? Me neither until I sat down to write this. We all fail, likely every day, and guess what? That is AWESOME. Will, why on earth would you say failure is awesome? Ironically, you would ask me that in a post about failure! Let’s explore, shall we?
Failure is something I have an intimate relationship with; hell I’d say the thing I’m most successful at is failure. That isn’t necessarily a good thing, because, like many relationships, my love of failure isn’t always healthy. How is your relationship with failure? Here’s a little exercise that’ll take 20 seconds:
For the next 20 seconds try to think of the last three times you’ve failed. It doesn’t have to be anything major, it can be anything you’ve attempted but weren’t able to complete. How did you feel when you thought about these failures, were you anxious, excited, or meh? What was the first thing you thought of? Now, here’s the payoff to this question-after you think of those three failures, think about whether you learned anything from those failures, and if you thought of the way others judged your failure. I don’t need to know the answer to that question because it’s important only to you. My point in asking you about those three failures is, hopefully, to help you find the positive in what you and many others believe is negative. The positive begins with how you responded to the second question-did you learn anything and possibly even more importantly, did you look at the failure as an extension of your identity or simply a building block of success?
Let’s talk about failure from a positive point of view. When can failure be a good thing? For me, the place that jumps to mind is working out in the gym. When lifting weights, no matter how low a weight, if you lift long enough your muscles will reach failure and you won’t be able to move any longer. This failure is a positive since it’s the beginning of the muscle-building process and a great reminder that almost all successes begin with failure. If you repeat this process for a long period of time, your strength will increase as well as the durability of your muscles and body.
Failure is described by the wordsmiths at Mirriam-Webster as “omission of occurrence or performance”, “lack of success” and “a falling short”. For this piece, let’s use the definition “a lack of success” and see how that has seeped into the fabric of our society and crushed more dreams than those winos Ernest and Julio Gallo ever crushed grapes. We’re judged constantly, whether we like it or not, in some form or fashion by each person (and dog) we interact with. To judge is to be human since many of those judgments are instinctive, like determining whether a person is a perceived threat. Judgment and failure intersect when we, as the person attempting something, allow the judgment of others to affect our ability to begin something challenging out of fear of judgment. When we’re more concerned about the embarrassment of failure than gaining knowledge from trying and failing, we create a negative feedback loop. That feedback loop gets stronger and stronger the more we fail ourselves by avoiding challenges.
The embarrassment of failure is something I've faced a lot in my life and I couldn’t be more proud. If you’ve known me, either online or IRL, you know I have virtually no problem laughing at myself. I’ve had to embrace this because I put myself out there to be laughed at. Here’s the thing, I’m sure many people think I'm a giant failure. I’m not a big podcaster with a huge audience, my writing isn’t read by the masses, my videos and tweets have never gone viral and I’m not a multi-millionaire. Folks probably think about what I do and say it’s cringe af and probably a giant waste of my time and the time of those that may consume my content. And I couldn’t give a fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I do this first and foremost for myself because I believe what I’m doing and saying brings a sliver of good to the world. Do you know why I know I’m a success? Because I’m proud of what I do. The only competition I have is with myself; I wake up every morning knowing I must try to make this day better for myself, and others, than the day before.
It would be easy for me to sit here and tell you to <insert cliche about being motivated> and voila you’ll stop being concerned about the embarrassment of failure. As if there’s some secret sauce to embracing failure and you need only to add the ingredient you’re missing. That’s bullshit just like all of the lists on Twitter or motivational quotes that pass by your Facebook feed (for the over-40 crowd) telling you how to find success. We don’t flip a switch and get over life-long fear of failure; that’s not realistic. So how do you do it? Here are a few tips from my point of view, a point of view that’s failed countless times:
Start small-find a challenge you know you can overcome and do it.
Build upon this methodically-don’t set yourself up to fail by embracing a challenge you’re not prepared for. We don’t go from bench pressing 125 pounds to 275 in a week.
BE PATIENT-Rome wasn’t built in a day and your ability and willingness to fail AND learn from it needs to be honed.
Make failing a habit-that sounds counterintuitive but what I’m saying is don’t stop challenging yourself. Find the joy in the pain of failure and make knowledge valuable to YOU.
Don’t tell anyone-Yuuuup, until you’ve succeeded, don’t tell anyone you’ve done anything until it’s complete. This helps eliminate the fear of judgment and therefore failure.
Surround yourself with other failure’rs-This is something I've struggled with. People that aren’t afraid to fail and admit it can be rare.
Embrace truth-Don’t sugarcoat your failures when you’re dissecting the “why” in your failure. Be brutally honest with yourself; that’s the only way you get better. Accountability is vital.
Enjoy learning about YOU-Failure teaches us about ourselves and that can be very scary for a lot of us; we’re afraid of who we are, so we avoid digging too deep. You’ve got to wrestle with this to truly be free to fail spectacularly.
We’ve got to be good to ourselves when we fail. We can be entirely too hard on ourselves if/when we fail at something, so keep that in mind as you set out to succeed. You’re not defined by any one thing in life so don’t look at a failure as who you are or your identity. Hell, if anything, make your identity revolve around failure, lean into failing because you know deep down that each time you fail, you’re getting better. So long as you inch forward, learning from your mistakes every inch, you’ll be a fantastic success.
Failure is one of the few things every single human that has ever walked Earth has in common. Think about that. Drink it in. You have something in common with every person you know and don’t know alike. In this world of division, tribalism, hate, grace, love, and glory, every one of us has experienced failure at one time or another. We fail spectacularly in relationships, projects, speeches, jumping jacks, ditch digging, hang gliding, and nail filing yet we keep on trying. I want you to succeed and I want you to be happier when you do it. By setting yourself up for success in your failures, you, like me, can be the most successful failure you know.