"You loved her so much. I'm sorry it didn't work. You tried so hard."
I was in the midst of a divorce. My friend was offering words of comfort. I was appreciative, yet I also felt a twinge of discomfort. The consolation was partly for pain due to the effort placed. Failure hurts. Failure hurts more when it’s for something public and large. And it especially hurts when we've given something our best efforts.
Or does it?
The joyous dream of married life crumbled as my partner and I concluded we were better going separate ways. I was devastated. Nobody gets married anticipating a failure. Especially not the intelligent and successful individuals we believed we were.
As time passed and I could see things with a clearer perspective, I realized the opposite of what my friend had consoled me was true.
I did not feel sadness for the effort placed and the failure. Rather, it was because I had tried my best towards the relationship that I could comfortably move on.
Failure is a strange concept. Failure is unwanted, uncomfortable, embarrassing. We avoid it. Yet it's also lauded. Popular management advice tells us to "fail fast, fail forward!" Failure becomes something we simultaneously avoid and seek.
Failure is neither something to avoid nor seek, but rather to expect in the pursuit of our goals.
As I moved on with my life, I learned a crucial aspect of failure is how we think about it.
Our perception of failure directs how we act.
Our response to failure directs how we grow.
If we understand failure is a necessity, we can reframe our fear from it. And if understand how to handle failure, we can reframe our distress to it. From there, we can analyze and learn to do better.
Perception - Failure is necessary
We tend to fear and avoid failure. The pain and embarrassment alone turns us away from our pursuits.
But we must be aware that failure is also necessary for success - in life and in work. The better we learn to accept failure as part of our paths to success, the better we can get going. In fact, failure is necessary to reach our greatest successes.
Great outcomes require many tries
Society celebrates great achievements. Mozart, Picasso, Edison are revered for their gifts to the world. What's less known is that each produced huge numbers of work. Most were unremarkable. Mozart composed over 600 pieces of music, Picasso made close to 2,000 paintings, Edison had over 1,000 patents.1 The greatest innovators created a lot. In other words, they tried and failed a lot.
The same is true with business. Innovation is necessary for a business to thrive. And high innovation requires a lot of tries. Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, listed bracing for failure as one of seven components that contribute to Amazon's success:
"If you invent a lot, you will fail more often than you wish. Nobody likes this part, but it comes with the territory."
Amazon has certainly a lot of failures - from an "ice cream truck for adults" to the infamous Amazon Fire phone, the list of public failures is large. You can sure bet there are many more failures that don't even make it to the public.
Failure teaches comfort to fail
For a time, I was fearful to talk to people I didn’t know. I worried about sounding dumb or seeming weird. I worried about rejection. To overcome this fear, I went out and tried to strike up conversations with random people - at the mall, on the street, at grocery stores. I did this hundreds of times. I wouldn’t say I eradicated any fear of talking to strangers, but I became much more comfortable with the idea and practice.
Exposure to a fear can help habituate to a fear. The more we experience failure, the less fearful we become of it. We realize that failure is not fatal, and we grow. With many failures experienced, we:
Are more likely to act in the face of fear
Learn to recover quicker if we do fail
Failure means we're stretching
When we don’t experience failures, we’re acting completely within our realm of competence. While it feels good to succeed, it feels worse to be stagnant in our growth. Failure can be a signal that we are stretching beyond our capabilities.
“Better to shoot for the moon and land in the mud, than to shoot for the mud and land in the mud.”
The idea of "flow," developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is described as an optimal experience for humans - a state where we are in complete absorption of a task. It’s when we become so engrossed in something that we lose sense of time and other activity around us. A key contributor to reaching flow states is that we are straddling our edge of competency. We must be challenged to our limits to reach flow. Failure is necessary to inform us of our limits and to build our skill.
Caveat - Failure is not the goal
While failure is necessary, it's worth noting failure is never the goal. In light of efforts to normalize failure, failures can be applauded. We can get seduced to imagine failure as a success. If so, we become undisciplined towards true success - at worst we aim for goals we know we'll fail at. It’s not very hard to pick an audacious goal, fail at it, and then “celebrate” failure.
Response - Fail happened. Now what?
We realize the necessity of failure, we pursue a goal in earnest, and failure bestows us. What we do when we fail determines the benefits we reap.
Reframe negative feelings
Failure feels bad. But how we think can change how we feel.
1) Celebrate the effort, not the outcome
If we separate our effort and action from the outcome, we can celebrate our efforts. It takes courage to put ourselves in a position with risk of failure. Rather than dwell on the outcome, we can celebrate the courage to act and the growth obtained. As long as we tried our best and made the best decisions given what we knew, we have every reason to celebrate.
"Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts" - John Wooden
2) Tune out the schadenfreude
We fear failure in part due to the perception of others. Our minds race with thoughts - "What will others think if I fail?" We have precious self-images of success we uphold to the world. Failure challenges this image.
When we do fail, the world is not always kind either. Misfortune can be an entertaining form of gossip. Ostensible empathy from others may have deeper feelings of pity and schadenfreude, the joy in another's misfortune.
Schadenfreude abounds in business as well. Businesses are derided in the media for failures. For example. Facebook's focus on virtual reality is arguably the most derided technology the company has ever invested in. It's easy and fun to offer commentary.
Tune out the commentary.
3) Own the failure
While failure is often out of our control, we have to be ready to own a failure as well. Us humans have a strange tendency to own our successes but blame our failures. A bad presentation at work is blamed on a disagreeable colleague. A poor test score is explained away as poor teachers. This phenomenon, known as the self-serving bias, leads us to discount our failures and ignore them as sources of learning. Once we open our minds to the failure and own it, we can learn from it.
Learn from the failure
Once we've acknowledged the failure and reframed emotions, we can reap the benefits of learning and growth.
Apply curiosity. Approach the failure as a curious event lush with learning. With curiosity, we can analyze for improvements and observe for opportunities.
1) Analyze the process over the outcome
Any endeavor we take on is a series of decisions we make. The decisions lead to successful or failure outcomes. Analyze our decisions and our process. Go through the decisions and process and ask "what would I do differently?" "what was a good decision, what was a not-so-good decision?"
We again need to separate the process over the outcome. It is entirely possible we made all the right decisions yet experienced failure (or we could have made all the wrong decisions yet experienced success).
In Super Bowl XLIX, Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll made a fateful call with 26 seconds left in the game that lost the championship for the Seahawks. Rather than take the obvious decision to hand off the ball to Seahawks star Marshawn Lynch, Carroll made a different decision and called a passing play. It was wildly derided as the “worst play in football history.” Upon closer inspection and taking into account probabilities, it was the correct decision, wrong outcome.2
2) Look for seeds in the failure
Kevin Systrom, then a 20-something entrepreneur, was building a social game. The app, Burbn, was meant to be a social game where people would check-in at physical locations. It was a failure. It never grew beyond 80 users, most of which were friends of his. However, upon closer inspection of how people were using the app, the team noticed photo uploads were a popular feature. It was still early days for smartphones, and cameras on smartphones weren't of the highest quality. Kevin and the team decided to pivot their product. From the ashes of Burbn, Instagram was born.3
We can examine our failures for seeds of new opportunities. Within our failures we may see ideas, insights, and evidence of different directions to go in.
The dots connect looking backwards
A divorce can be one of the worst failures in our lives. At least it can feel so if we go through one.
But if I look back at the string of failures in my life, it is precisely the failures that kickstarted a different stage in my life. I learned, I changed direction. I changed my perception of failure.
The mindset to perceive failure with courage and respond with growth opens ourselves to new directions.
Our perception shifts from fear to acceptance. We can remember the greatest achievements require many failures, failure builds comfort to fail, and failure means we’re stretching.
Our response shifts from shame to curiosity. We can navigate our emotions and mine our failures for lessons learned and seeds of new insight.
With the right mindset towards failure, we no longer need to fear, celebrate, nor run.
Rather, we acknowledge failure for it’s role in the great experience of life.
"To ward off the bogeyman of failure, we keep a safe distance from it. If we aren't guaranteed to win, we assume the game isn't worth playing.
Behind every great artifact not invented, great achievement not done lies the fear of failure." - Ozan Varol
Endnote:
Thank you to anyone who has ever read my writing and offered kind words. It wasn’t comfortable share this personal event. I believe in the power of failure and thought beneficial to illustrate with my experience. Thank you for your support.
For anyone who has or may be going through adversity, I also about wrote about ways to overcome adversity. The ideas are mostly from Sheryl Sandberg’s book on her experience of losing her husband.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Grant; “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World”
Annie Duke; “Thinking In Bets”
https://mastersofscale.com/kevin-systrom-how-to-keep-it-simple-while-scaling-big/
Loved the way you focus energy on the learnings and growth that come as part of failure , great read!
Love the Simpsons quote -- another similar homer quote I live by "Trying is the first step towards failure"!
I remember my first real failure in life was when my startup went belly up. Until then, I was on a prestigious upward trajectory -- Ivy League College --> Investment Banking --> Venture Capital --> Startup Founder (humble brag shame me please!)
That all came crashing down. My startup failed (aka shitty acquihire), I think got laid off from that acquirer a year later, I think joined Lending Club and got laid off their too, then I took a year off to learn to code, only to learn I suck at coding. I joined a crypto exchange -- I quit within the year. Then went back to Venture, did some great deals, built ultimately wasn't a fit.
It thought me that all jobs come to basically one outcome: now matter how good is starts, it always ends the same. Either you realize the place isn't great for you anymore (and you leave) or the place realizes you aren't great for it anymore (and you're pushed out).
Now I'm at Meta, soooo....
I got comfortable with this outcome and have sorta embraced it.