What Have you Failed at Lately? (Learning 10,000 ways of knowing how not to do something…)
“How you handle failure determines your overall well being. Failure is only failure with the wrong mindset.” – Clinton Skakun
Nobody likes to goof up, especially when there are others watching. The worst part was not goofing up, but came later on, when you started replaying the scene over and over again in your mind, suddenly it seems like a big deal.
Or maybe you have memories of investing long hours, sacrificing time and money into a project that turned out flat. Now your attitude towards that project has turned ugly. You make excuses and logical arguments to back up your quiting. You build up a reserve of resentment towards future your projects and become a little more cynical, doing everything to avoid ever chancing falling flat on your face again.
- Do you put off practicing, instead flipping through books, because you’d rather not practice unless it’s “perfect practice?”
- Do you avoid going through with an idea or making a decision because you just don’t have enough information yet, and after weeks or months still don’t?
- Do you constantly put off giving a speech, making a phone call, or writing a letter(oops, I meant e-mail!:D) because you just can speak like John F. Kennedy, make phone calls like they do in the movies or write like Emerson?
- Do you beat yourself up after failing or messing up because failure is below your standard?
“Too many organizations today have cultures of perfection: a set of organizational beliefs that any failure is unacceptable. Only pure, untainted success will do.” – LifeHack
Maybe it’s fear of failure, perfectionism or sensitivity to anything that will cause pain, no matter what the potential gains may be. We work hard to avoid failing. But there’s one very important factor that all great performers have in common: they’re not perfect, and they fail more than anyone else. Who better to learn from than a person who’s failed so many times that they’ve succeeded?
The real question to ask ourselves everyday is: What have I failed at today that has given me something valuable to learn from?
You’re not going to speak like John F. Kennedy or write like Emerson until you first speak like a seal with a speech impediment and write like an iliterate drunk and stoned dude. It’s an embarrassing, interesting and unpredictable process that leaves you with something priceless and leads you somewhere great.
There’s an old saying, “success is a poor teacher”. Don’t ask, “what have I given myself a chance to fail at today?” That’s like asking, “did I give myself a chance to get out of bed this morning?” (if you didn’t you woke up dead)
There’s another old saying, “If you haven’t failed at anything lately, you’re not doing too much.”
Read the question carefully, especially “given me something valuable to learn from”. Don’t throw your life savings in the stock markets and don’t start a business selling apple peals, just for the sake of failing. You can’t learn a whole lot from failing at something you already know about. Fail for the sake of learning.
In web development a developer needs to make hundreds and even thousands of tweaks to his code before he or she can make a simple web application to work. I have yet to sit down, write a perfect peace of code and have it all work in one try. It takes these “mini-failures” to get the application running. Imagine if web developers and computer programmers were all afraid of making a mistake? We’d still be waiting for someone to develop HTML.
This is what it ultimately comes down to: You need to get over the fear of failure, and inability to generate a result(meaning a failed or successful result) at all costs. Sure you might find shortcuts along the way, like modeling experienced people, but a competent person knows what works and what doesn’t and has failed forward to get there.
“The fear of failure is perhaps the strongest force holding people below their potential.” – Pick The Brain
Losses that educate you aren’t really losses, but million dollar gains. Inaction doesn’t educate you, inaction is permanent, failure is temporary, inaction costs you millions. Inaction is the disillusion that success lies on top of an inexperienced foundation. Any success that lies on that type of foundation is helpless when bombarded by problems that demands experience.
Inexperience is always a challenge of getting something out of nothing. Experience is waking up 5 years from now and asking yourself, “if I could start again, knowing what I know now, what would I do again and what would I eliminate?” Inexperience is not knowing the good from the bad, besides what’s obvious, because of lacking enough experience to have the ability to discern.
Here’s a good exercise for you to do in order to learn from failure:
- Which 3 greatest failures in the past have turned out to be the greatest learning experiences?
- What am I pretending to be experienced at, but am many failures away from mastery?
- Which current goals require me to fail many times before I accomplish them?
- What attitude can I adopt to handle the emotional stress of failure when it comes? (e.g. The past is permanent and forever gone, live in the now, in 5 years the failure won’t be important but the lessons learned will be vital, this would be a good story to tell at a party, at least now I know what not to do.)
- And ONE more, in honestly and carefully observing myself am I a perfectionist, am I afraid of failing or am I trying to avoid emotional pain?
Here are a few ideas you can use to set yourself to fail and learn from it:
- Quit taking yourself so seriously, you don’t have a reputation to live up to.
- Stop thinking of past failures as being negative, instead look back on them as the best times of your life.
- Think of the nature of your life. Is it exciting, full of experience and chances to learn OR is it dull, perfect and shallow?
- Do something different, even ridiculous for a change. Go out of character, try new things, look at people in a different way, ask different questions.
- Even a magic pill requires trial and error before it works, decide that your greatest education comes from trial and error in your life and the mistakes made in the lives of others(make sure you learn from others as well).
When times get really bad, think of it as a bunch of shit you have to get through to move up, to handle greater challenges in the future. One of your goals in life should be to get comfortable with taking on bigger and bigger challenges. The things that used to caused you great anxiety, will be a peace of cake. Avoiding failure makes your life less comfortable, staying in your comfort zone, getting devastated every time a small challenge comes along, that just so happens to be outside your comfort zone. It’s not totally about knowing how not to do something, but rather about desensitizing your emotional, mental and maybe even physical(if you’re an athlete) feelings, that hold you back, in a way that works for you. Successful people have bigger challenges than poor or unsuccessful people. Don’t look at success as a an avenue to a perfection. The most successful people have learned to handle challenges better than anyone else. Success is just a part of being able to handle it better.
“There is no failure. Only feedback. “ – Robert Allen
“You always pass failure on your way to success.” – Mickey Rooney
