On Failure
I would be remiss to write this post and not mention that a number of the ideas were heavily influenced by or learned from The School of Life’s How to Fail class. Hopefully I’m able to provide my own lens on the subject, but I highly recommend exploring The School of Life if this interests you!
If you’ve seen Randy Paush’s Last Lecture, you may be familiar with:
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
On one hand, I think this has a lovely sentiment- just because you run into a brick wall does not mean you should stop, and everything, even brick walls, has its own purpose.
On the other hand, I’ve had periods in my life where I thought back to this quote and thought: They told me about the brick walls but didn’t tell me it would feel like the walls were collapsing on top of me.
Looking back, I had a few misconceptions. I don’t think failure is bricks pinning you down and preventing you from moving forward. It’s more like coming across a really deep, muddy patch- it’ll certainly be harder to walk through and you’ll move slowly, but there’s always something on the other side, even if it takes some time. Another was that once I had failed, I had learned my lesson and wouldn’t fail that way again. But it is never a matter of “what if I fail” or “what if I fail again”. There are no ifs about it- you will fail. What you have control over is how you fail and how you move through it.
A lot of motivational posters, books, or speeches seem to try to empower people with a “You can do anything you put your mind to!” attitude, and thus focus on how “you can have it all” no matter what the limitations are in your life. This is also incorrect. A more accurate representation of life is “You can do anything… but not everything.” The honest truth is that everything comes at the cost of something. Having a strong career may mean more time away from your family. Maybe taking a ton of risks means your work isn’t consistent. Building a strong network means less time on building your own projects. At the end of the day, you are a human with a certain number of hours in the day and a certain amount of energy. There is a finite amount you can achieve with that no matter how superhuman you seem.
Besides the costs of things relative to each other and the choices you make- the math is against you too. Many people’s far flung dreams are probabilistically speaking, impossible. How many musicians never “make it” compared to the few we always see on the charts? How many authors are able to fully sustain themselves from that work compared to the number of drafts publishers go through every year? We see tons of zero to hero stories, because that’s what society likes to put on a pedestal. But it gives us a false model of what success or failure looks like in the real world.
(On the other hand- your probabilities could vary drastically from the norm. Your safety school or job could be someone’s improbable dream.)
One effect of unrealistic expectations is on one’s self esteem. If you consider self esteem to be the proportion of one’s success to one’s expectations, you can see how this unbalanced view of the world will inevitably lead to a low self esteem. What can you do about this? Well, you can either raise your success- which is extremely difficult- or you can lower your expectations- which is still difficult… but relatively easier.
"Our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities"
— William James
For example, a lot of people feel pressure to be successful in all areas of their life- their career, their family, their friendships, their hobbies. This is compounded by the fact that we tend to speak in over-sweeping generalities- largely referring to successes or failures, not “success in this area” or “failure in that area”. Being able to see and discuss shades of grey instead of the black and white of success and failure will help us have more realistic views of others, and more realistic goals for ourselves. Actively knowing that your success in one area means you’re choosing failure sounds defeatist, but in reality it gives you more control to say “I’m choosing to fail in this area” vs thinking you should succeed and failing to live up to your own expectations.
There’s a further nuance to failure- there’s bitter failure vs honest failure. Regardless of if it is failure in a way you choose or expect, it can still plague you if it’s framed as a bitter failure. Just think about how “The publishing industry is a scam and full of sellouts” vs “The publishing industry is biased and difficult to break into” affect you differently.
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What I have learned is, it’s okay to fail, not only because of what you learn from it, but because sometimes it’s exactly what you need. Success does not make you immune to failure again- and failure does not mean you’ll never succeed again.
A parting exercise for the reader: a year from now, you have neither wildly succeeded nor wildly failed in your career, relationships, or finances. What does your life look like?
