Embrace Your Failures!

“I don’t have any failures; I only have learning experiences.”   

An overly optimistic entrepreneur uttered the preceding quote to me, and I retorted that he should be fired if he spoke this to his team. My reasoning was simple: His stand evoked childish and wishful thinking that could only thwart intentions and cause still more failures.

Sugar-coated blandishments are commonly invoked when breakdowns occur – it is seen as “staying positive,” or “keeping an optimistic outlook.” I certainly don’t advocate wallowing endlessly in the pain of failure, but denying the very existence of failure is flawed, weak, and dangerous to one’s future. Reducing the sting of failure is predictive of still more failure. 

By not recognizing failure, you forfeit valuable opportunities to design new thinking and action to produce the outcomes you want. This happens because denying the existence of failures effectively strips them of their pain; it makes them less real.  As such, they are no longer urgent; they’re simply learning experiences. Learning can wait until tomorrow if your’re tired or busy, whereas unacceptable situations produced by failure demand your attention today. 

Experiencing the discomfort of failure is important. We’re hard-wired to avoid pain, and in the face of failure, the resulting pain brings two valuable opportunities:

1.    The opportunity to design new action in the future. This includes preventive measures to avoid the same failure again. If we experience a breakdown that causes a project to be late or a sale to be lost, we can design new actions the next time to produce a new result. 

2.    The opportunity to design new action now. If we are strong enough to acknowledge failure – that is, if we can accept that we are not producing that which is required – we create a space of possibility in which new actions must be designed. This is where invention can happen. Even the Wright brothers didn’t nail it on their first try.

As I explained to my overly-optimistic entrepreneur, he was not only denying these opportunities to himself with this thinking, but he would also deny them to his team if he preached his flawed reaction to failure with them.

We’re in a harsh business environment, to be sure, and I can well imagine an angry chorus crying out that my stand lacks compassion. But the reality is quite the contrary: If you deny the existence of failure, whether by ignoring facts (aka denial) or dressing up reality in the fantasy language of “learning experiences,” then you deny yourself and others important opportunities to design new thinking and action.

So be compassionate with yourself and others by embracing your failures!

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