Learning to Fail

Was it easy for you to learn the language that you natively speak? How about learning to ride a bicycle? How many attempts did it take for you to feel competent at the task of boiling pasta?

Do you know how to fish? Or play the piano? How long did that take? Was there any trial and error involved before you had some success?

You weren’t born with these skills. In fact, if you’re like me you weren’t born with?any?skills. But somehow we manage to develop them, gradually, over time.

Talk to somebody who is learning a new language, a child for example. What you’ll hear is an endless cycle of trial, error, correction, and repetition. Competence slowly increases, and mastery eventually emerges.

Think of how you learned to ride a bicycle. You made a mistake, you fell, maybe you skinned your knee. You got a bandaid and a kiss.

Maybe you didn’t want to get back on right away. Some time passed, you stared at the bike on the sidewalk. Eventually you squinted at it and thought “You know what, I can do this.”

You tried again, and you fell again. No bandaid this time, just rub some dirt on it. Next thing you know, you were teetering, then gliding, then pumping and soaring away, leaving your nervous parents far behind.

That’s what it’s like looking for a job: Trial, error, correction, repetition. You are practicing and learning your career development skills. As you go through it, you’re getting better at it. There is no other way.

Nobody is posting about their rejections and failures, but the fact is that you must fail at it before you can succeed. Very rarely will you read a “I have some news!” post on LinkedIn that describes the frustrations and disappointments they experienced before they got the job they’re announcing.

Many of us stop practicing our career development skills immediately on our first success. Take a job, and take a few years off from talking about yourself. Of course it’s going to feel like starting over. Think how well that works for something like golf or fishing. You declare victory, then retreat!

Think about the expectations you set for yourself when you’re learning a new skill. Some frustration is expected. Are you going to conclude that every failure represents the delivery of an existential verdict from the universe about your deficiencies?

Or are you going to squint at the screen and say “You know what, screen, I can do this.”

Yes, you fell off the bicycle. But the bicycle did not reject you! The fish did not get caught. But the fish did not ghost you!

Remember that during your job search,?you are practicing your career skills.?You are practicing them with the goal and purpose of improving. Prospective employers are not Olympic judges. They are like hay bales on an archery range: Practice targets. You are practicing your skills?on them!

Practice takes time, errors, repetition, and correction. Feelings of failure and frustration are normal. But those feelings don’t define you, and each experience does not describe you.

Your current résumé is a practice résumé, and it always will be. In a week it will be better than it is today. Your cover letter is a trial version, you’re writing it to find out if it works. Every interview is an occasion to practice what you’ve learned, to improve on the last one, to see what kind of result you can get.

From the judge’s score we learn something about a single performance, but we learn nothing about the athlete. A perfectly-swung club can still send the ball screaming into the weeds, woods, or water. It means nothing about the golfer.

You’re practicing. That’s how learning works.