Failure

Failure

What is failure? We all experience it. But only some people know how to learn from it to be more successful in the future. I have tried to explore the meaning of failures, the relationship between success and failure, and why one shouldn’t fear failing. It’s natural to try to avoid things that could end in failure. Failure can be embarrassing and painful to experience. But what is failure exactly? Failure is defined as a lack of success or the inability to meet an expectation.

One of the major problems is that we can read too much into failure. Too often, we tie it to our sense of self-worth, self-esteem, and self-acceptance. The expectation we fail to meet is often our own, or one that we’ve created in our own head. Most of us don’t set out looking to fail at anything. And we especially don’t want to be labeled as a failure. But maybe that is a mistake.

Imagine yourself in each of these three scenarios and whether you’d consider yourself to have failed:

An experienced marathon runner sets a goal to run his next marathon in under four-and-a-half hours. This goal is a full 15 minutes shorter than his prior best time. He completes the marathon in 4 hours and 36 minutes. Besting his prior record by nine minutes. But in his vision not achieve his goal, failing by six minutes.

A senior director seeks a promotion to VP and competes against other internal and external candidates. She receives positive feedback. But she gets told that the leadership team felt that hiring an external person would demonstrate their commitment to change. Hardly her failure, yet can upset her motivation massively. This kind of failure also brings into the mind equations of luck and seeking the lack of justice, both in the decision and in her fate.

A top young professional at an organization gets asked to prepare a slide deck for a high-profile meeting. He submits what he considers to be an excellent presentation to his boss. The boss praises the work but substantially changes the slides before the big meeting. Thus he now becomes a side player, while the boss takes the credits with minimal effort. This sort of failure can upset the success to failure expectation of almost every person, thus diminishing their pursuit for excellence.

Notice that the differentiator in all three of these failure analysis examples is an ideal we’ve set in our minds. Measuring goal achievement can be a subjective and thoroughly analytical  activity and needs to be done with no emotional strings attached or else it fails. And in each of these examples above, you can sense that the individuals tried hard and performed well in their efforts. Perhaps that common definition of being in failure mode as “not achieving a goal” isn’t so accurate and straightforward, after all.

Failure can be useful. We can learn from it, gain new insights, and do better next time. The right kind of failures give us new information and teach us something that gets us closer to our goals. Some live by the motto: If you aren’t failing you aren’t taking big enough risks. Said another way, if everything you try turns out exactly as planned and feels very comfortable, you probably aren’t stretching yourself. And if you aren’t stretching, you aren’t growing.