Why you should seek failure

Failure is often associated with feelings like shame, guilt and pain. When we grow up, we tend to get teased or bullied for failing to live up to others expectations, calling us a failure when in fact failure is not a person or a trait, it’s an event. We even get taught in school that failure is to be avoided as much as possible, through grading systems and tests that we are told will shape our entire future. A Great way to give people at an early age extreme performance anxiety, and, obviously, a fear of failure.

This to me is extremely damaging, and something we as individuals need to take great care to heal and overcome. No, failure in itself is not what we should strive to “achieve”, obviously counter intuitive. But what we have failed to learn, what we are not taught in school or anywhere else really, until you are old enough to seek it out for yourself, is that so much in life is only learned through failure. A lot of things cannot be taught simply through reading and doing written tests. It has to be learned the hard way.

It’s all about risk tolerance

The entire system that we live and thrive in, or at least thrive by the definition of the norm, is built on the idea that you should learn exactly how things work and how to do things, and then do that repeatedly for 40+ years until you retire. You learn your skills at an early age, find a job that fits those skills, avoid making mistakes and keep succeeding, hopefully get promoted a few times until you finally can retire with your gold watch in hand and a solid 401K.

This is no longer the case for most people in the work force, as times have changed, not just the pension systems in most countries, but the corporate cultures and the idea of working for a single company your entire life. Still, we live with the bagage of learning to avoid failure at all costs that we were taught, contributing to the stigma by never actually giving our ideas or dreams a shot for fear of what we will look like.

But what we don’t to realize, is that we fail every single day, just at a much smaller scale. We make mistakes, we forget things, we say the wrong thing, we have small ideas that turn out to not work in the end. Yet, these kinds of failures, are not seen as failures. We tend to just brush them off as simply mistakes, or being wrong. Why? Because we have normalized them, and because the risk is tolerable to us. We can handle being wrong about the color on our bedroom wall. We can handle making the wrong call on which road to take to work to avoid traffic. And what we do, is we learn from these small mistakes, and, hopefully, don’t make them again.

Yet, we don’t see these as failures. What we usually see as a failure, is loosing our job, being dumped, loosing a competition or our business going bankrupt. Basically all things that we categorize above a certain threshold of risk, or severity of consequence. What I believe this does is worsen our own ability to accept the possible outcome of our venture, that is us failing, because of how we associate that failure to the other things we label as “failures”.

But really what it comes down to, is a certain level of risk. It’s where the outcome we don’t wish for comes with a consequence that is harder to swallow or deal with. It doesn’t have to be catastrophic. Most, if not all, consequences that would somehow inflict harm, either economical or emotional, on others, can be avoided with the right due diligence. But what can’t be avoided, is the actual failure itself happening if you do end up failing.

The results are never as bad as we think

But what does that really mean to you? Do you ever stop to think, when you imagine yourself going for that big dream you’ve always had, what actually would happen if you failed? Could you do things to avoid the results having actual damaging effects? Most likely. And what would remain, the pain of failure, shame, guilt, the idea of what others would think?

All these things, let’s call them soft effects, are never as bad as we think. As Seneca said, we suffer more in imagination, than in reality. People so much less about you and what you do than you think. Most of those ideas of what other people would say or think about us, are in fact our own mind trying to protect us. What I’ve found myself is actually the opposite, that people are impressed and supportive of me giving my dreams and goals a genuine chance.

Yet, I spent so many years, wishing, dreaming and sometimes even hoping someone would come along and push me over the edge of action. I thought I needed someone else’s approval for doing what I wanted, most likely because I wanted someone else to be able to take the blame for when I failed. How much of your unhappiness is due to how you think other people think of you?

Don’t rob someone of the lessons of failure

And that was the big realisation for me, when things started to change and I really started actually doing things, for me. That I wanted someone else to blame for my failure, whenever I did end up failing. I wanted to be able to take credit for the success, without the blame for failure, which is obviously not how it works. I was so incredibly wrong, and realized that that in the end was what was keeping me from actually giving my dreams a shot.

That, and the fact that no matter how many business, self-help, psychology or philosophy books I read, none of them would make me into the person I wanted to be. None of them would magically give me all the things I wanted to have achieved. They might give me the tools, some of the knowledge and tips I could use to improve my chances of success (standing on the shoulders of giants and all that). But in the end, what stood between me, and all the things I wished to accomplish, was the work. And in that, the failure.

Because what was never going to be found in those books, were all those invaluable lessons and insights that can only be found in the work, and in the failing. It’s found in the feedback, the praise, and even more importantly in the criticism of your work. How else, are you supposed to know what good work actually looks like? How could you ever know, why any works of art are actually seen as the masterpieces they truly are, when you have never gotten the same feedback from your own paintings being critiqued hundreds, if not thousands of times?

It is through that critique that we find out what is truly great, and what is not. What is beautiful, and what is not. And in most cases, what it is that people truly want. Because that is in the end what you are after, if you want to make something that has an impression on people. Whether that is to build something that solves a problem for people and make a living off of it. Or write a piece of music that moves people to their core, to make them listen to it over and over again in their darkest moments.

You need that feedback. Yes, start with yourself. Do something that you truly think is great, that you would love to have in your own life. Then, ask for feedback. Genuine, honest feedback of how it can be better.

When we are kids, we learn that a stove is not to be touched when it’s turned on, by placing our hand on it and quickly pulling it back when we feel the painful heat on our skin. The trick is to not keep it there trying to prove yourself strong or more masculine for doing so, that’s just plain stupid. And the same goes for taking risks as an adult. The risk will always be there, but you don’t have to be stupid. Some things you have to learn through experience, but understand the risk to avoid making stupid mistakes, and you can gain that knowledge and experience without taking such a big hit.

For the one’s who wish to build something

As someone who has built things on the web for all of his working life, I have built my fair share of apps, websites, services, products and systems. I have built more than one CMS system, my own component library, designed my own icons and done things my own way, more than I could remember to count. But what I’ve learned through it, is that not everything people say is a mistake, will be a mistake. Some, obviously will, and sure could’ve been avoided if I would’ve listened. But some, won’t be mistakes, and might end up becoming something you both learn and earn a lot from.

What I’ve been able to learn through doing what I think was right, is that not only will I not always be right, but I have greatly increased my own ability to be right by doing them. I can’t always ask people what the right thing to do is, and I don’t want to either. So, by that logic, I have to do a lot things to learn what is the right thing to do. And I highly encourage you to as well. Learn from the best, take advice from people who have done what you want to do, but also trust your own instinct and be willing to fail in order to learn the lessons that can only be found in the failure. You don’t just want the success that the people you look up to have, you also want the knowledge that they have. And I guarantee you that it did not come exclusively from doing everything right.

If, like me, you want to build things and make a living from building things of quality, then become comfortable with showing your work. There will always be critics, there will always be people who want you to fail. But what they don’t realize is, through their insults that they hurl at your product, they give you the blessing of feedback. They literally tell you how to do it instead, in order to succeed. Unless they are just throwing shit at you, in which case, just eat it and move on. The shit won’t make you fail. What will make you fail is choosing not to learn from what you do and the feedback you get, repeating the same mistakes over and over until you give up in frustration from not succeeding, asking yourself “Why am I not a success?”.

So, to summarize. Failure is good for you, it means you gave yourself a shot. But don’t be stupid and just throw yourself out into the abyss without the faintest idea of what you are doing, armed only with the hope of success. Study the greats and the fundamentals. Focus on finding real problems to solve, and listen to the people you are trying to make things for. If you do that, at some point, you will succeed.