Failure is Death

Breaking news: there’s no failure in sports! At least according to a Milwaukee Bucks player on my Instagram feed this week. Here’s his take: “There's no failure in sports. There's good days, bad days, some days you are able to be successful, some days you are not.” While I love the spirit of this, left glaring in his comment is the erasure of failure. To me, this is pure Pollyanna nonsense: optimism at the expense of realism. Here’s my challenge: if you’re gonna say there’s no such thing as failure, then there’s no such thing as success either. Why? Because they are two sides of the same coin - one can’t exist without the other. It’s light and dark, good and evil.?

Seeing that IG video reminded me of the last days of my company. Like many entrepreneurs, I staked a lot on the success of the business: emotionally, physically, financially. So when it finally became obvious that we were crash landing (an exit, for certain - but not the one envisioned) I framed up our dissolution to my friends and family in the way any strategy guy probably would: we failed to reach our goal. To me this was a simple declaration of fact, but what came next is what got me puzzling. To a person, the most common reply I heard was ‘oh you didn’t fail - you succeeded. Think of all that you learned! in learning a ton.’ Or some variation of that. Which is certainly true, but what’s also true is that I DID fail.?

Both of the above examples point to a reluctance, a fearfulness perhaps, to say the word failure out loud. As if by invoking it you somehow make it real. Is “failure” the professional equivalent of “Beetlejuice”? Three incantations and you’re completely screwed, in ways only Tim Burton can conjure? So why is this the case - why are we so scared of failure, and how have we dealt with this fear to date?

Here in the US (and in Canada, my first home) we have a storied tradition of ignoring, bowdlerizing (my new fav term), or legislating out of existence the aspects of our culture we’d rather not think about. So maybe failure erasure is just that - a collective redacting of facts we need not share. The equivalent of banning failure in schools - or in books.?

Or is eliminating failure a kind of socialism? In this example, everyone has a shared, guaranteed outcome - everyone succeeds, no matter what. Sure, there are different flavors of success, different intensities, but everyone is guaranteed to succeed, so let’s just all do our best. As they saying goes ‘you know what they call the person who got a ‘D’ in med school? They call them ‘doctor’, same as everyone else that graduated.’ I guarantee you if doctors had to post their grades when they hung a shingle, the healthcare landscape would look a lot different.?

But, I have another hypothesis that’s more existential in nature: failure is actually a kind of death. Think about the similarities: not only is it not talked about openly (although that is changing), but certain prominent religious groups reject the idea of death entirely - believing instead in everlasting life. That’s the ‘success only’ model. In truth, failure is death as experienced by our ego. It’s the delta between our perceived reality and our actual reality. In short, failure is your ego dying from the pain of cognitive dissonance.?

And why exactly does this matter? First of all, because most businesses are failures, not successes - and many of us head into business as ill prepared for failure as we head into adult life unprepared for death. Additionally, failure is an integral part of daily business operations. Think about goal setting: the best way to achieve something is to set overly ambitious goals. That’s what we had done in the example above. The idea implicit here is that we’ll get further by shooting for the moon than we will merely shooting for the top of the house. And chances are pretty good we won’t get there. But when the inevitable happens and we fall short, I’d argue we’re better prepared by knowing it’s an inevitability than to pretend it doesn’t exist, or didn’t happen.?

Coming back to sports. Imagine if there really was no failure. There would be no joy of victory, no agony of defeat. Watching most sports would be the equivalent of a fourth-grade soccer match. You won just by showing up. Go pitch ESPN that one and see where you get.

So here’s my insight. We do ourselves no favors by measuring things by success-only metrics. Failure exists - and will happen to all of us as surely as death will. So prepare for it, have an ‘end of success’ plan they same way you (hopefully) have an ‘end of life’ plan. Because I think they person that knows failure is inevitable will enjoy success a lot more on the rare instances that it happens.