Because failure is never final…
The true irony about failure is that people fail to understand it, and the huge place it holds in our learning, and indeed our whole life experience.
Failure is often seen as the opposite of success, but I believe, as do many others, that failure is actually a crucial ingredient in achieving success. That’s right, failure can be one of the most powerful tools we have for growth and learning.
Yet, for many of us, merely the fear of failure can be paralyzing. We worry about what others will think of us, we doubt our abilities, and we hesitate to take risks.
But what if we shifted our perspective and embraced failure as a necessary part of the journey towards success? Can we change our relationship with failure so completely, that we decline to let failure stop us, and in fact use it to guide us forward on a better path?
I’ve made no secret that I’ve failed at many things. I failed way too many driving tests before I passed. I’ve failed in business, I’ve failed in relationships, and I have perceived failures in some of my friendships. I’ve failed at jobs and at being brave. At times I have completely failed myself.
The one thing that all of these failures have in common, is that they did not stop me. Every time I failed at my driving test, immediately upon returning home I booked the next one. I took myself, like a lamb to the slaughter, off to another test, knowing in my heart of hearts I would be repeating my post-match ritual in approximately 90 minutes. It could have been soul breaking. With every perfect drive I would cringe on my return to the test centre when I was so sure that this would be the time, and then, ‘I’m sorry Donna…’ Dang it. Where’s my phone, I have a test to book.
Imagine my alarm then, at what I heard at the end of my final test. In what I’m sure was a pure act of defiance, I gave up trying to please the instructor with my perfect manoeuvres and my smooth braking, and I just moved through the motions of the test with absolutely no regard for what he was thinking. He was going to fail me anyway so let’s just cut to the chase. The drive was horrible, and every minute felt like agony. I just wanted to get out of the car that day. The instructor must have known in because after twenty minutes he told me to return to the centre. Well this one was a record.
As we pulled up, I braced myself for the usual, but to my absolute surprise, the examiner looked at me and said, ‘the road was terrible today, everyone seemed out to get you and cut you up, but at no point did I feel worried or unsafe, so you’ve passed.’
I burst out crying.
This story has always been the one that I come back to when I think of failing. All of the times I had failed taught me that they don’t want perfection, they want to see calm under pressure, they want to see safety. It taught me what driving actually meant to me, and how much I was prepared to go through to be allowed my freedom. It taught me that I am capable of not giving up. That day, I became my own hero.
Thomas Edison cracked the nut for me when he said ‘I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work’. Because failure isn’t final, all we are doing when we are failing is finding out how not to do it next time.
How many people have left a string of awful relationships, only to be the best partner in the next one? They have learnt what did not work, and they are practising what they know to be better.
This is a continual, lifelong process. We are supposed to keep failing, for all of time, so that we are renewed repeatedly into better versions of ourselves.
How many iPhones have there been in the last ten years? How many You’s have there been in the same amount of time? If you have not spent that time failing, you have not spent that time growing. If the newest iPhone was perfect, there’d never be another one. But we know that will never be the case. Yet we struggle to accept the same is true for ourselves. We are not perfect, we are supposed to upgrade, uplevel, move on.
Regarding perfection, Salvador Dali said, ‘have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.’ And this is the real truth. I spent years wrangling with my perfectionism. I wore it as a badge of pride, ‘I’m a Virgo, it’s what we do…’ whilst simultaneously being medicated because I could not cope with the lack of perfection around me. Wow.
It is no small thing to call ourselves out on our attitudes and behaviours. I don’t mean in a negative and diminishing way, but in an honest and fact-finding way. To understand why you do something the way you do, is to assess with honesty the motivations and emotions that are at play.
This is what we should be doing when we encounter an actual or perceived failure. Rather than feeling angry or upset about it, we should be looking at the how and why. What lesson is this teaching us, and how can we best put into action what we have learned?
It is this internal process that really helps us take what we should be taking from failure. The worst thing we can do is refuse to take the lesson and repeat the mistake, as Sophocles wrote, ‘all men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.’
Pride can stand in the way of much that is good, but to allow pride to stand in the way of your own self development is to practically doom yourself to perpetual failure. Henry Ford believed that ‘the only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing’, and this mantra can help us to realise that there are no mistakes, only lessons, which softens the blow of failure to a mere error.
It is hard to quell our inner self-saboteur once they are primed to begin the bashing, but if we reframe our mistakes, errors and failures as lessons, we can really begin our journey to full maturity on the matter of self. We can start by looking back and taking to ourselves about all of our perceived failures. Find the lesson/s in every single one. Find the silver lining. There will always be one, even if we haven’t recognised it yet.
When we actively engage with ourselves in this way, we can truly begin to understand that failure isn’t final, it is merely a lesson, and perfection isn’t possible, so have no fear of not reaching that either. Operate in a space where you are managing your own self development proactively, and where being a good person tops the chart above all other achievements.
Because that is one thing that we should never want to fail at.
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