Failing Forward

How do you see failure?

There's a couple of different camps on this one. The most common view of failure comes from the group that says "You haven't failed until you've quit!" Cute sentiment, but that's just denial. Denial is a lie, and no lie in the world can help you reach your goal.

The second most common view of failure, in my experience, is what I'm going to call the dieter's approach. This is the idea that if you fail on Tuesday you might as well stop trying until Monday. This camp sees every failure as a devastation, a comment on their worth and ability to do things right. They see life like it's a game of chutes and ladders, with each failure being a chute straight to square one. For them life is a roller coaster and they ride from disappointment to disappointment, ultimately throwing their hands up in surrender to the seemingly inevitable and giving up altogether.

Both of these views come from the way we were taught to see failure in school. As infants, we know instinctively that failure is just something that happens when you're on the way to where you're going. We fall down and get right back up to try to walk again, being wiser for having fallen because we now know that simply lurching to the left will land us on our bottoms (or faces). This attitude continues through our toddler years as we experiment with the way the world works, but is halted suddenly when we enter school.

In the educational environment, failure is a stopping point. If you fail a test, that's a percentage of your grade you're never getting back. And whether you've failed or not, the new concepts will be introduced the next day. Failure isn't a learning point in school, it's a brick wall that smacks you in the face and holds you back for the rest of the year if you don't go through inhuman efforts (and beg someone with a higher grade to tutor you) so that you can catch up. Maybe. In my experience, once you've failed a few tests or homework assignments, your year is screwed.

Because of this, a fear of failure is born. Fear of failure will only hold you back in life. Psychologists have been dancing around this fact for years and are just now starting to meet it head on. When I was in middle school, studies and articles were published telling teachers that they should stop using red pen to correct assignments because the red color of the corrections damaged the students' self esteem and made them less able to grow into successful adults.

You and I both know that's malarkey. The color of a pen doesn't determine your success in life - so long as you know to fill out legal documents in blue or black. What actually happens there is that the child falls victim to the view of failure that the education system passes on, by throwing a brick wall at them with every 'F' and then leaving them behind to fail again and again as everyone else progresses without them. This, in turn, makes the child into an adult who is terrified of failing.

No bueno.

The third view of failure is one of the common denominators between all of the successful people in the world: Failure's just part of the process. This view takes us back to the understanding we had as infants and tells us to learn from our mistakes and move forward, gaining momentum with every failure. Doesn't that sound much better? The truth is that failure is just what happens when you get something wrong, and it's okay to be wrong sometimes as long as you don't stubbornly choose to stay wrong.

Today, examine your most recent failure and decide what you're going to learn from it that will help you on your journey.