Failure is essential to success

Failure is an essential component of success. It’s not the intention of Mr Mistake and Ms Error to discourage you or make you give up and throw in the white towel. Their true motive is just to stop you in your tracks so that you can reassess your situation, learn the lesson being given and get on the road to success with more knowledge and experience than you ever had before.

Giving her speech at Harvard University in 2008, J.K. Rowling¹ of Harry Potter fame echoed these sentiments when she confessed:

‘Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.’

Failure gives you the opportunity to re-strategise, and re-launch again to better prepare you for success. We learn more from the scar tissue we gain from the wounds of failure than the curriculum of any theoretical qualification.

You will recall that early on I suggested that failure in developing a new skill or competence failure is inevitable and goes with the territory. Remember the juggler’s mantra:

‘If you ain’t dropping then you ain’t juggling.’

Well, it applies not only to juggling but to life itself. Realistically, life itself is a series of successes and failures, and sometimes we can only get things right by getting them wrong. It is very easy never to fail – just do absolutely nothing. In fact, no failure results in no successes. We now know only people now who are not making mistakes or failing are those who have taken up permanent residence in a graveyard.

Many people don’t try because trying and pushing the boundaries means the possibility of failure. When the fear of failure is dominant in a person then failure comes with a guarantee.

‘Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.’ Chinese proverb

In Zen philosophy it is suggested that life is a series of lessons and if you ignore them then life repeats the lessons until you have learnt them.

T.S. Eliot, in one of his less enigmatic poems, gave us all quintessential advice by writing:

‘We had the experience but missed the meaning.’

And this is the essence of making success out of failure. If you miss the meaning of your experience then you invite failure. All of us make mistakes but if we make the same mistake in the same situation, over and over again, then we have been missing the meaning. Of course failure hurts and is humbling. None of us sets out to fail at anything but sometimes it’s inevitable, so let’s turn to the question: ‘How do we make success out of failure?’

Dealing with failure

It’s important not to let your ego get in the way and push your mistakes into a deep hole where neither you nor others can find them. Admitting your mistakes and errors is the first rule of achieving success from your failures. You can’t do anything about that which you pretend doesn’t exist.

As already stated, neither you nor I set out to fail at what we do. We act with the knowledge and information we have available to us at the time. If this is so, how can we, when faced with failure, become disappointed with ourselves or our efforts? Hindsight always has the advantage of 20:20 vision and, if you had had 20:20 vision in the first place, you would have done things differently.

‘Failure is the crucible that tests your commitment, your courage and your moral fibre.’ Anon.

Managing failure requires resilience which is that ‘getting back on the horse’ phenomenon. Brush off the dust and climb back in the saddle knowing that sometime in the future life is going to buck you off again – you won’t know when, or how or where, but the fact that you know that it is going to happen should not deter you, even when you find yourself on the ground yet again.

Success is never permanent and failure is never final.

Psychology and failure

One of the basic maxims of human psychology is very simple: ‘We maximise pleasure and avoid pain’. On the basis that mistakes and errors are painful, then the obvious way of dealing with that pain is to avoid the same situation again. However, if you tread on your dancing partner’s toes you will never be able to stop doing it if you sit out all the dances and look at your two left feet.

Successes from failures

This is the truth: you usually have to fail to succeed. Here are some global examples:

1. Steve Jobs, at the age of 30, was fired from the company he co-founded. In his now famous speech at Stanford University in 2005 he said, ‘What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.’ Then he went on to say, ‘It turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me ... The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life.’
   Jobs became involved in a small computer graphic company which became Pixar Animation Studios, which when sold made Jobs a billionaire. (Jobs unfortunately died in 2011.)
2. Akio Morita of Sony started out producing rice cookers – the only trouble was his product burnt more rice than it cooked.
3. Bill Gates’ first foray into business was a disaster. His company Traf-o-Data processed paper tapes from traffic counters. When it was discovered that the product had many bugs, no local government would touch it.

No matter what the error is, the biggest failure is to let your emotions sabotage your journey.

‘It’s fine to celebrate success but it’s more important to heed the lessons of failure.’ Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft

Strategy 1: do the analysis

Back to T.S. Eliot and ‘missed the meaning’. You can ensure that this does not happen by asking some basic questions to maximise your learning:

• What actually happened?
• Could I have seen the error earlier?
• Was the preparation adequate?
• Have I tried this before and failed?
• If so, why did I repeat my error?
• What alternatives did I consider?
• Were there enough resources?
• Was the objective reasonable?
• What was in my control?
• What was not in my control?
• What knowledge did I apply and was it adequate?
• What skills did I use and were they adequate?

Then come the two big and most important questions:

1. What did I learn?
2. What can I do differently next time?

With major errors and difficulties it is well worth writing down (in your development log book) what you have learnt and what you will do next time. In writing your learning points down you are far more likely to remember the objectives that you have set yourself.

Strategy 2: increase your risk-taking

This will increase your failures. This may sound counter-intuitive but it’s effective because you are venturing into new fields and, as you do so, you are developing all the time. Obviously there are considerations here regarding how you perform in your job but remember that all the great entrepreneurs are risk-takers. Richard Branson’s book Screw It, Let’s Do It, personifies this risk-taking attitude.

Strategy 3: rejoice at failure

When we fail the usual response is negative: we might feel ashamed and we would certainly want to withdraw from those who know of our blunder. We feel that only success is worthy of celebration. However, given what we now know about failure and how it leads to our personal development, it’s more appropriate to celebrate failure. The celebration of learning is a worthy activity. Negativity is limiting; positivity is liberating.

Strategy 4: find balance

When you have a string of successes, do not fall into the trap of thinking you will always have a charmed life. Similarly, if you have a run of failures this will not last. Somehow the world is like a flipped coin where, in the end, the number of heads equals the number of tails. If you think you are always going to win then when failure inevitably comes, and it will, you will be devastated and your recovery will take a long time. Similarly, if you have had a run of failure the danger is that you will give in and not try. Let me repeat myself: success is never permanent and failure is never final.

Strategy 5: examine what you learnt from your failures

Go back to the life line activity that you completed earlier. Where the line drops below average, see how it does not stay there but moves upwards towards an achievement. That indicates your personal learning and development. So list your failures in your log book and against each one record what you learnt and how you developed from that unfortunate experience.

Strategy 6: read biographies of the famous

This is most illuminating as one normally assumes that the famous go from strength to strength. Not so, and reading about your heroes and how they overcame adversity will not only inspire but will help you emulate their tactics and behaviour when things go pear-shaped for you.

Strategy 7: what is the worst that can happen?

So you fail: are you going to die, is your partner going to die? Of course not! Will your children still love you? Of course they will! These comparisons help put your failure into perspective and prevent you from ‘dooms-daying’. Here is a true story:

A friend of mine worked for a large event-management firm which was hired to provide catering for a very important event in the English social season. It involved hiring many casuals, tents and marquees, equipment, etc. My friend managed and co-ordinated all of this excellently. There was only one huge problem – he organised everything one week before the actual event. You can imagine not only the total chaos but the significant cost and implications for the company’s reputation. The mistake was so enormous my friend was summoned to see the chairman to explain himself.

The result? He was not fired and in the years to come the chairman, with some devious amusement, would always ask his directors how my friend was doing.

I would not recommend this tactic but sometimes ‘all’s well that ends well’.

Burn your errors

• Think about and list the major failures or errors in your life.
• Put each one a on a separate sheet of paper.
• Say to yourself, ‘I did the best I could given my experience and my knowledge at that time.’
• Then say what it was that you learnt from the error.
• Having reflected on what you have learnt or how you have developed, put a lighted match to each piece of paper in turn and let them burn safely, one at a time, in a suitable bowl.
• As they burn, take a deep breath and then let any thoughts of self-inadequacy go.

	‘What the caterpillar calls the end of life, the master calls a butterfly.’ Richard Bach
	‘The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.’ John Enoch Powell, British politician

• Failure is essential to success; without failure there can be no learning.
• Mistakes, errors and failures cannot be avoided: they go with the territory of life.
• Admitting to failure is essential; you cannot learn if you don’t admit to failure.
• Mastering failure needs the resilience not to give in and collapse but to get up and try again, and in the trying is the learning and self-development.
• There are seven strategies for the successful management of failure:
  1. Analyse what went wrong and what you need to do differently next time.
  2. Increase your risk-taking.
  3. Rejoice at failure.
  4. Find balance.
  5. Examine what you have learnt.
  6. Read biographies of the famous.
  7. Consider what is the worst that can happen.