How Can We Better Fail?

We chicken out. We do it all the time. We want to succeed, yet we’re okay with failure. We just don’t want to land in between. We are not putting ourselves at risk which destroys the likelihood of success and dramatically increases the chance of being in between. Too often, we take the lazy way out and memorise the status quo instead of challenging ourselves to understand how the world works. Worse still, some of us can’t be bothered to find out how we work. We go along with what is convenient, and when things don’t work, we simply blame the outcomes. We don’t blame ourselves for the lack of work to understand how we operate or the system of the world. It is like we’re walking around like fearful zombies. It is like we’re never simply awake. We are groggy. We are zoned out. We are hyper.

But we are never present.

I believe one of the reasons why this is happening, intentionally or not, is because we do not want to feel like a failure. However, feeling like a failure has little correlation with actually failing. I’m sure we know people in our social circles who have achieved more than most of us can imagine, but still go to work each day feeling inadequate like failures and frauds. Failure is an event. It points at the specific project that didn’t meet our expectations. It is objective. On the flip side, feeling is an emotion. It points at the persistent stories we tell ourselves over and over again after that the project fails to turn out the way we want it to be. It is subjective. More than that, it is surprisingly powerful. It is fine if we beat ourselves up once in a while.

But if we keep pulling the thread, we might just be a failure as a consequent of perpetually feeling like one.

It is crucial to understand that experiencing setbacks hurt our self-esteem, but has no effect on our actual performance. Sure, failure may affect our willingness to explore, but what we do next is not impaired by failure. In fact, failure is a necessary condition for future success. The challenge with coursing through failure is less about the failure itself, but more of how we cope with our emotional responses to the failure. When we start to label our emotions in a non-judgmental stance, we begin to be less reactive and more proactive. We may be angry, but we need to acknowledge that it is angst that we are feeling. We may be anxious, but we need to accept that it is anxiety that we’re experiencing. This way, emotions are clearly identified with no inherent bad or good label. The question is never about — “What if I fail?”

The question has always been about — “After I fail, what next?”

When in doubt, let’s look for the fear. Chances are, many of us have not been in close proximity with fear for a long time. We’re stagnant. We’re not terrible. We’re not good. We get by. We might be scared, but we’re not scared enough to do something about it. So we build a home in our comfort zone knowing jolly well that we cannot fail if we don’t start.