Rethinking "Don't Be Afraid to Fail"

By March 15th of 2020 we all knew we were in it, we just didn’t know what ‘it’ was, but it was big. The markets had begun to tank. Would this really be a two week or two month thing? Everybody hoped so but privately knew that it was much worse than that. The phone calls and email from clients slowed dramatically. Was this it? After twenty-five successful years my business was going to be taken out by a virus? A VIRUS? It couldn’t be. How long could this last?, I, as I am sure all of you, asked myself. A better question was, how long could the asset column feed the debit column? From where could I borrow if we exhausted cash? Was it practical to borrow if we didn’t know if things would ever be normal again. Within weeks the nauseating term ‘new normal’ was everywhere. What the hell is that? Everyone loved saying it, but nobody else knew what it was either. It simply had alliteration and we love alliteration even if it makes no sense, it sounds good. It sounds like an answer. But it wasn’t. Eventually I stopped my brain from racing and began calculating multiple hypothetical financial scenarios for the company.?

A- Not too bad.?

B- Bad.?

C- Really bad.

My pencil robbed from Peter, paid Paul, and then mugged Paul to keep Peter alive. In the end I had arrived at survivable calculations for A, B, and C. I had no solution for ‘D’. D would have been ‘Beyond really bad’, and if that was the world, then we were in economic Armageddon and nothing really mattered. Luckily as of this writing, it was scenario A for us. By the time mid April 2020 came, the phone calls and email slowly started with regularity. New work, long term projects, things to do. Almost everyone in our professional, non-service sector world, was adapting. It may very well have been the first time that I had to acknowledge that the idea of failure had been let into the room. Even so, I refused to offer it a seat, a drink, or even look its way.

Failure.?

I remember seeing the tip of this odd new vogue iceberg coming, but at that time, ten to fifteen years ago, I thought I was just reading the business news.? It was more than that. Start-up businesses were adopting this new attitude with gusto. Alphabet, parent of Google and YouTube, keeper of the billions; they started it really, in our current landscape. It made sense for them, having more profits than they could count, to gather some of the brightest minds and conceptualize previously unthinkable paths for upstart businesses or product developments. When one idea rises to the top, throw a team together and invest heavily, perhaps putting a loss cap at between 50 and 100 million dollars before it becomes viable. After losing $100 million, maybe pull the plug and try something else. Right now a really popular word in the ad and journalism lexicon is ‘audacious’, it is overused, but this Alphabet thing, THAT was audacious! The idea here is? - ‘Hey, we have great resources of cash sitting around - let’s do something great with it. Let’s try things that nobody would have invested in before. If we lose money, so what, the accountants will fix it in our favor and we may just discover and own the next enormous thing in the process. Let’s not be afraid to fail, we can afford to!’?

They could afford to. Therein lies the proverbial rub.?

It was a liberating notion. Such freedom. Just like that: ‘what would you do if you had no fear?’ motto. It’s a good one to regularly ask yourself, to be sure, but failure? Failure is not quite the same as lack of fear. To think about failure so flippantly and to consider failure being another form of success is to make failure that much more likely an outcome.?

I had a friend who was getting married. He and his wife to be had lived alone in separate apartments prior to the wedding and when they got a house together his wife’s furniture was deemed to be better and they outfitted the house with it. I offered my friend some ideas for divesting himself of his furniture, but he told me “No, I am keeping it all. I love my wife to death but? I am going to put it into storage because you just never know if things are going to work out.” That was not a winning wedding day attitude and they are now divorced.? He may not have realized how powerful the idea of accepting failure at the outset could be.

It was and is belief in myself that has gotten me wherever it is that I have gone. As far as my G.E.D. could take me. In fact, I believed very vehemently that I would not fail. Not that I couldn’t, but that I wouldn’t. I didn’t fear failure, because I never thought about failure as being a potential end game for me. It is belief; what your mind fixes on as you set out to achieve whatever goals you have imagined for yourself, that guides and informs the inevitable outcome. Most people would attest to holding some version of the idea that your mindset and beliefs have implications on the outcome of any given challenge. A very succinct analogy might be that a runner about to partake in a race that they have trained for, would never consider or hold in their mind, for even a second, the idea of failing. It is counterproductive and indeed counterintuitive to hypnotize yourself (that is what these thoughts are) with the notion that failure is a likely, possible, or acceptable result. Should you think less of yourself or anyone else if they try with everything they have; work triple hard as the next person; plan, prepare, and execute with the best strategies available; if after exhausting everything, they arrive at failure? Absolutely not and that is not what I am suggesting. But the mantra being adopted these days is much more cavalier and is the antithesis of how I believe anyone should embark on reaching any goal. “Don’t Be Afraid to Fail”? It’s great if it means that in the very unlikely event that you do fail, it isn’t the end of the world. But the way that it is thought of today is accepting it as some sort of false virtue before we’ve even taken the first step. Once you suggest it to yourself as an acceptable option, you’ve created a path for the thought patterns that lead to demise. Why would we do this? What I hear the rationale to be is:

- to not make work the most important thing in your life

- to recognize that mistakes that caused failure could be valuable lessons

- to not shame those who have failed

If your goal is to not work a lot, perhaps starting a business is not a great plan for you. This is the inconvenient fact that doesn’t jive with the social media rhetoric that we are fed: To get a small business up, running, and profitable, for the vast majority of those who do it, involves working nights and weekends, missing events and vacations as well as sleep. If this isn’t for you that is perfectly fine and perhaps working for a company where you can set time limits and boundaries is a better idea.?

Mistakes that lead to business failures can indeed be very instructive with hindsight analysis, but most business start-ups are nothing at all like Alphabet and have limited resources. Often, there is no second chance to execute the lessons.

Encouraging others not to shame anyone is commendable and most always a wonderful thing to do. In this context, if that is the intention, it is my postulation that it is being over done and may cause more harm than good.?

I want people to succeed and am trying to share some insights from what I have personally experienced and witnessed along my path. I simply wish to raise a flag of concern that some of these things that we tell ourselves, repost, and read as being a positive message are actually inherently destructive and no doubt play out to have quite the opposite effect of that which was intended. I would never want to use any permutation of the word ‘fear’ so I am not saying that we should be afraid to fail. If we’re starting a business or embarking on a big goal I’d suggest that we should plan, prepare, start small, test, revise, launch and grow with measured, well thought steps. Plan to work harder than we ever imagined. Plan to be successful and have our eyes wide open to all challenges, confronting them head on. Let’s maybe change that mantra to: “Don’t Be Afraid to Fly”. Keep ‘failure’ and ‘fear’ out of our mental and psychological gestalt.? This is the best recipe for success.?

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Jay Green is a Cannes Grand Prix and One Show winning composer, and owner of Big Science Music and Lumania Properties.