Enabling success by getting comfortable with failure

J.K. Rowling, a renowned author, has rightly said “It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default."

This is true, by giving in to the fear of failure we often tend to block our potential and eventual success. And, the fear of failure is even more strong when we’re already in a challenging situation. By focusing on what we might lose, we in fact restrict ourselves from going for what we might achieve. However, setbacks and mistakes are inevitable in life, and they form the stepping stones to success. I have seen this to be true for every successful person or organisation.

Hence, it only makes sense that we all must take advantage of mistakes and failures. Instead of spending hours to identify the “perfect” action steps, we should take “good” steps and plan to learn from any errors that come with them. This way we can make ourselves efficient and effective. Being willing to take action in ambiguity is difficult, but we can make it easy by building a plan to learn from the consequences and fix blunders.

So to make every initiative a success, I adopt the strategy of taking action, failing early, and learning quickly. But, how did I train myself to make this a part of my decision-making process?

Below are 5 steps that have helped me get comfortable with making mistakes and taking advantage of failure. Hope these help anyone who’s at a roadblock and on their way to success.

Accept the fact that failure is an essential part of the process

To get comfortable with failure, we need to believe that it is an important part of the process that will lead us to our goals. Only through failure and mistakes do we learn what not to do, going forward. It allows us to reflect on the approach followed, the controllable factors, and the action steps that would have led to a better outcome.

Keep in mind that:

• If you’re faced with a setback, this is not your final destination,
• It is not your “only shot” - this world has plenty of opportunities,
• And failure is the much-needed feedback that helps you move towards your desired outcome.

Understand the price of inaction

By avoiding taking action, due to a fear of negative consequences, we essentially leave ourselves in our comfort zone. And, it's important to ask ourselves - “What are we losing due to this inaction? Time? Resources? Opportunities? Potential Success?”

Every hour that we spend fearing mistakes and failure is equal to an hour that we don’t spend on seizing the opportunity and achieving success. Hence, what we should focus on doing is pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone to take action and make plans to manage challenges when we experience them.?

Put a time limit for moving on from short-term losses

In the short term, usually when people say “I don’t think this is working out” and decide to quit, persistent people shake off those failures and keep going. We need to understand that success is achieved in the longer run. Hence, what we need is a growth mindset and a mixture of optimism and persistence.

To enable this, a practice that one can follow is setting a limit to the time for dwelling on the blunder that you made. For example, whenever you face a major setback, allow yourself a maximum of 24 hours to dwell on what went wrong. After this time is complete, put things behind you and focus on what you can do to bag a win in the long run.

Build a culture of being quick to detect and learn from mistakes

We should create and live by a culture that takes us away from the blame game, makes us feel both comfortable and responsible for detecting and learning from mistakes. In the case of an error, the focus should be on clearly understanding what happened, not who did it. Along with this, we need to report errors, small or large, analyse them and learn from them. Because the faster we fail, the faster we’ll succeed.

To adopt a culture of learning, we should shift our perspective from “Mistakes make us appear weak and incapable” to embracing positive associations - “Mistakes give us experience and take us one step closer to success”.

Promote risk-taking and experimentation

We must understand that failure is a necessary by-product of experimentation. In fact, strategically producing failures, in the right places and at the right time, helps obtain valuable information before our competitors do. This doesn’t mean that we must conduct big experiments with large budgets, but more so a small pilot or a demo will be sufficient.

For yourself and your team, promote risk-taking behaviour, which is backed by a plan to learn quickly and progress towards the overall objective. Leaders must build the courage of allowing their teams to speak up, and respond with a willingness to experiment instead of instant disapproval.