Instead Of Avoiding Failure At All Costs Rather, Embrace The Willingness To Fail

Let’s go back four years. It’s 2020, and the world is shut down. Glen Nelson is supposed to be opening a private art gallery in New York City. Instead, he is at home on the Upper West Side.

So, what will the nonfiction writer and art curator do? He starts a new learning curve—creating his own art.

Less than two weeks later, he reached the top of his new artistic S Curve.

If Nelson’s S Curve was to master all the nuances of drawing or become a professional artist, he would remain firmly at the launch point. But that was not Nelson’s curve. He gave this particular S Curve specific parameters: read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, complete its exercises, and journal about the experience.

While Nelson moved through the S Curve quickly, he still experienced each phase. He started slowly at the launch point, then moved quickly through the sweet spot where he began to feel “like a real artist.” He finally reached the top of the curve when he completed the last exercise and reflected upon the challenge in his blog.

Nelson arrived at mastery, entering into the Anchor stage —the stage at the high end of the S Curve where we have achieved our objective and the new behavior is part of us. It is anchored. Nelson finished the final assignment in his book, sharing he felt “motivated and pleased” because he had “come a long way.”

“Motivated and pleased” is the sense of quiet celebration at the Anchor stage when we know we have completed a learning curve. And celebration, whether done in quiet solitude or loudly with a large group of friends or colleagues, is key.

But it is not just a celebration of success that is important—it is the celebration of our willingness to fail.

Failure, specifically leveraging failure, is one of the seven accelerants of growth—the tools that help speed growth along the S Curve. To leverage failure, we must first put ourselves at risk of failing—a risk we often forget once we reach mastery and celebrate our successful journey to the top of an S Curve.

So, in the Anchor stage, we drop anchor and pause long enough to reflect on the risk we took starting a new S Curve. We consider all the paths we could have taken, the resistance we felt as we learned something new, and all the places where we thought we might fall or did fall but were still able to move forward.

By acknowledging the risk we took and the growth we’ve achieved, we allow ourselves to look in the mirror and say, “Success.” Because, whether our S Curve is modest or monumental, we have changed.

Our lives are full of S Curves and in the end, many small anchorings add up to major growth.

Some of our S Curves are brief, some are long, some are the short curves that make up the greater ones, and some will last our entire lives. But all of them require risk.

So, as we reach the Anchor stage of each S Curve, it is important to take that time to acknowledge the risk we took—the failure we willingly faced to grow. To continue to grow, we will have to face failure again and again willingly.?

What role do small anchors play in your growth??

What failures did you have to face to reach mastery?