Failure 101: Our failure to talk about failure the natural way

One day, I caught my twitter-self scrolling through what seemed like an endless feed of success stories, success wisdom and success hack threads. And suddenly, I felt bad for failure. The poor sad little thing.

Failure: <exists>

The world: You are bad, you’re a monster everyone runs from, your only retribution is to serve as a stepping stone to success. You are cursed to be the evil nemesis of Success for all of eternity!

A few days later, I was chatting with a friend about the tremendous amounts of pressure on CEOs, especially the newer CEOs of older companies, who are constantly pressured to exceed expectations, and just don’t have the option of failing. Everyone says they learn from failures, but our primary instinct is to fear it, we try to avoid it at all costs, which I thought was rather hypocritical of us.

In that moment, as if Failure found its chance to be heard and seen as something more than the proverbial Stepping Stone, it appeared to me out of nowhere and suggested feebly, “maybe you need to write some failure stories”.

Me, who’s good at hearing feeble voices and suggestions more than the strong ones, jumped out of bed and started looking for Failure Stories online while still on the phone. Didn’t find the type of thing I was looking for. I often see people talking about “we need to talk more often about failure”. But mostly there is one article or tweet that says that we need to talk more often about failure, and then it happens when it happens. I LOVE the irony in failing to talk about failure. It’s like failure at its best.

Anyway, I toyed with the idea of talking to people about failures and writing about them. I wasn’t clear about what sort of people I wanted to talk to, and why. It seemed like there’s a reason we don’t talk about failure except in terms of stepping stones, lessons and so on. Maybe nobody wants to hear it. Maybe nobody even wants to say it because who wants to be seen as a loser just talking about their failures without making it constructive. It seemed like a wasteful enterprise. Plus, I am on the way to doing some Very Important Things in my entire life and career. Why would I spend my time talking about this totally undesirable thing? Maybe its only use is to teach people lessons and make them successful after all.

But having found an empathetic friend in me, Failure wasn’t going to let me give up yet. It came to me in many avatars over the next few days. You know, like when the universe conspires. Out of the unsuspecting blue, over and over again in the middle of phone calls, newsletters, blog posts, Failure was regularly making an appearance as if asking me, “Hey buddy what about me, have you forgotten me already? Are you too ashamed or afraid of me? Or can you not think of a way to talk about me without making it all about my “better half” and all my siblings and friends?”

And so I came to some realisations and conclusions.

• Yes, I do want to write some Failure Stories
• No, I do not want to write about famous failures or failures with some sort of transformational message — there are enough of those out there
• The purpose isn’t to inspire people to be successful
• It is to normalise failure
• Why is there so much pressure not to fail, and then when we fail, to analyse and learn and do better? Why isn’t it as normal as falling asleep, waking up, reading a book, not reading a book, whatever?
• While everything evolves, and nature has a way of growing without someone telling it to, humans act like unless we are specifically told to grow, and we are given a How To guide to growth, success, winning etc., we won’t be able to do it. Why? Are we not a part of nature programmed to evolve?
• Perhaps fear of failure is as deeply impactful as a primal fear, drilled into us as early as infancy, and causes irreparable psychological trauma
• Parents, school, society, competition, college, workplace, marriage — the expectation to succeed lies hidden everywhere, and is at the root of so many other coping mechanisms and behaviours we develop in our growing years
• It’s up to each one of us to decide whether the constructs of success and failure as defined by modern society applies or matters to us
• Failure is valid and has an identity + existence of its own without its role in bringing about success

It’s hard to write about failure without making it about something else. It seems impossible and pointless. I am afraid to be pointless. I have been afraid of failure my whole life, and so has everyone else I know. You know how they say the only way to overcome certain fears is to do those things, talk about those things, face them head on, build a support group or community around it?

I don’t know where this is going. But I want to explore it. Since I have failed enough in life and continue to do so, I will start by writing about my failures.

I don’t even know why I have to do this. But I know I have to. If only to overcome my fears and doubts.

Failure #1 — Not owning my failures

One of the things I fail to do often is taking ownership of my failures, mistakes, regrets and so on.

It could be something simple like I missed my daily meditation because of an emergency early in the morning. Or I missed a deadline because I had a day full of phone calls.

Imagine if I said I took a shower but I won’t take responsibility for my shower? “I ate an apple but the internet outage made me do it!!!”

Sounds bizarre? So is trying to find a reason for not doing something. Just that we are conditioned to think otherwise.

There could be different reasons and contributing factors causing the failure. But it was I who made them nonetheless. Every time I fail and don’t take full responsibility for it, I fail a little more. In fact, every time I make enough of a deal out of it to find an explanation for it, I am humansplaining nature.

I don’t want to look at life as a series of experiences labelled into successes and failures. Life is just life. Always dancing, always multiplying, always evolving. Without pressure. So why should we interrupt it, mess it up?

To be continued..