Failure Essays

Intro

Failure is an experience. It’s not a question of whether you were doing something wrong, but how you think about it afterward.

If you’ve been practicing your craft for years and then one day you realize that you were doing something wrong and that it was actually your fault all along, then that’s failure consciousness. If it happened once, then maybe it will happen again. But if you do the same thing over and over again and get the same result, there’s no point in trying to fight against failure.

The Reasons Why You Fail

Failure is the point at which you become aware of your own limitations. The act of acknowledging a failure can be a source of personal satisfaction, and can also lead to new insights, new possibilities and a better understanding of yourself.

It’s important to understand why you fail (and learn from it), because if you don’t, then you won’t understand your own weaknesses properly, nor will you be able to improve on them in the future.

There are several ways in which we can consciously recognize our limits:

• We see what failure looks like: we see it happen when we try too hard; when someone sees us fail, they laugh at us or call us names (which is not helpful).
• We are exposed to failures at work: it is evident that other people don’t succeed, and so we tend to think that we do something wrong.
• Our failures become knowledge: after making an error or failing to achieve an outcome in the past, we gain insight and come up with different ways of thinking about how we might have done things differently.
• Our failures help us learn: failures teach us how not to make them again in the future, which helps build our skill set.

The first three points sound like good explanations for why people fail; however, I think it’s worth mentioning that some people fail without consciously recognizing when they do so — they end up succumbing to their unconscious tendency towards self-doubt due to factors such as social pressure or peer pressure. What this means is that if you have these kinds of negative thoughts about yourself (such as “I should be more successful”), then chances are high that you are also having negative thoughts about others as well (such as “I shouldn’t be so successful”). And this does not mean that everyone experiences these kinds of attitudes towards themselves or towards others; but these attitudes can certainly lead to bad habits and possibly even harmful things happening on a daily basis — such as lower productivity or lower satisfaction with work — which only gets worse over time due to the feedback loop between self-doubt and emotional reactions such as anger or depression.

Realizing That You’re Not Alone

Failure is a fact of life. There’s no real point denying it. There’s really only one thing you can do about it. And that’s to learn from your experience and not repeat it.

When you try something and it doesn’t work, the pain is real, and you know it. But what if the things that worked for you when you were younger don’t work for you anymore? What if something not working or failing to meet expectations feels so out of reach, so hard to understand, so uncomfortable? You may have been thinking that failure isn’t a part of life, but here we are talking about failure in your own mind: the thoughts that come up when you look back on something that didn’t work or don’t seem as good as what you expected.

From this perspective, failure is simply an opportunity for practice — one where we can try new things again under different circumstances with different people and learn what works for us (or not).

A common misconception is to equate failure with disappointment or rejection; this isn’t entirely true, but there are certainly downsides to either kind of failure (for example, fear of rejection may make people feel like they can never get another chance at success). Instead of flattening out all our potential by attempting something new and failing miserably all the time — just because we want to — let us think more realistically about what failure might mean:

It might mean learning from our mistakes so we can avoid them in the future – practicing our craft so we don’t make the same mistakes again – becoming better at our craft – being more nuanced in our understanding – getting smarter at a subject matter which has changed over time (say programming) and how it relates to different generations – understanding how technology affects us differently now than when I was an early adopter and how technology has changed the way I see the world – being able to keep up with changes in my own field without feeling overwhelmed by them.

This reminds me a lot of this quote from Jonathan Franzen: ‘Failure for me has always been a signal that I’m making progress’. It’s also been useful as a training ground for self-criticism: You’re never going to be perfect no matter how hard you try (but there’s nothing wrong with trying harder), so why give up now? Why not just keep pushing yourself till it happens? Someday eventually it will happen anyway

Do Things Better Next Time

Failure is a fact of life. It happens, and it doesn’t pay to dwell on it. Sometimes, you can get away with it. There are probably millions of people who’ve had a few failures in their lives and they have learned, or been taught, that such things are OK. When you fail at something, everyone around you knows about it — and when you fail at something new, the same thing happens: everyone else will tell you what a jerk you are for not doing better.

What most people don’t realize is that there is another way: failure doesn’t need to be failure; it can be learning.

Once you realize that failure isn’t a bad thing and that your failures can actually provide valuable lessons about how to do things better next time (and this is the result of failures), the pressure is off — but the benefits aren’t immediately obvious until you start to take them in.

Conclusion

A while ago I wrote a blog post called “Failure Consciousness”. The idea was to get a more realistic perspective on failure and to try and help people avoid it by avoiding it. It is something that some very successful people do as well, which is why I suspected that it was at least partly a psychological phenomenon.

I also wrote about this in another post called “Avoiding Failure and Failure Consciousness”.

The idea is that failure is a sign of one thing or another, but not necessarily of any particular kind of failure. So if you don’t fail, you might be closed off to the possibility of doing something else that might fail, or you’re finding other ways to cope with failure than actually taking action (which would involve moving on). At the same time, you might be experiencing something like success: you’re happy about what you’ve done and what has come out of it, but your overall sense of satisfaction with your life isn’t great — so there are probably factors outside your control that are causing this unhappiness.

If you can get yourself into the mindset where failure doesn’t matter (and having trouble with this), then perhaps things like procrastination start making sense too.

In my younger days I expected failure to be very bad for me — all kinds of negative externalities — but now I realize that being successful does not mean failing at anything else (or even at many things). While there are plenty of other factors at play (e.g., work-life balance, health), there may be some things we do better when we fail than when we succeed: maybe success means we can avoid some risks; maybe failure means we have more courage in deciding what to do next; maybe sometimes uncertainty comes easier to us than certainty because our expectations are lower; etc…

It is worth remembering that there is no right or wrong way to view failure — just whether or not you can handle it well enough to benefit from it without getting depressed over it (or if you persist in dealing with it anyway)…