Soft Landing, Failing Upward

Nobody likes to fail. In fact, there are few labels more humiliating for a person than “loser.”

Yet, if we are honest, our lives are more often than not characterized by the very thing we dread—failure. Our resolutions and our aspirations simply do not align with reality. 

Exacerbating the painfulness of this cycle of failure is the fact that the world puts a premium on success, on winning. 

We all want to win at whatever we put our minds to, and we secretly harbor contempt for those who fail. That is, until we fail ourselves.

This type of mentality for an elite group of ‘successful’ talent actually makes innovation harder.

At an even deeper level is a misunderstanding of what a successful life actually looks like. We think it consists in victory, in conquering all our competition, both internal and external. We believe that the measure of success is our feats of strength, our boundless determination and capability. But this is simply wrong-headed, and the road to discouragement.

At the root of our fear and disgust with losing is a deep belief that we are better and stronger than we really are. When failure says otherwise, when we are humiliated by our own faults, we recoil in horror. “Surely, I am better than this,” we think. 

The disappointment we feel at the manifestation of our true weakness often results in anger at both ourselves and at others. 

But why this anger? 

It is the voice of pride, and a subtle kind at that.

You owe it to yourself to put forth effort to be humble, to be true to yourself and hold yourself according to the truth for like a stream of water, it always rushes to the lowest place.

Unfortunately, the Oxford Dictionary carries a false definition of humility, one that characterizes it as "small-mindedness." 

In their quest to be humble, people often confuse humility with false modesty. I think we’ve all been guilty of this at one time or another. For example, we spend many hours meticulously putting together an excellent presentation for work, and when people praise us we say, “Oh, it was just something I threw together.” We have a tendency to devalue what we’ve done under the pretense of humility. In fact, people often take on the guise of false humility for the sake of receiving more praise and adulation from others. You want people to think “Wow, he said he just threw that together! Imagine what he could do if he had spent hours on it.”

It's a problem that people have been educated in this false sense of humility because small-minded people are afraid of making mistakes.

What is humility then?

Humility need not include timidity or becoming a wallflower. Instead, humility simply requires people to think of their abilities and their actions as no greater, and no lesser, than they really are. Real humility then mandates that people know and are completely honest with themselves. They honestly assess what are, and to what magnitude they possess talents and gifts, struggles and weaknesses.

Humility is the absence of pride. We are taught to think pride is a good thing. But pride functions only when comparing others to yourself. Don’t base your self-worth on how you stack up to others. Instead, focus on yourself and how you can improve. 

C.S. Lewis said the following about pride. “The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with everyone else’s pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive by its very nature while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next person. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking, there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride disappears.”

To back this point, I quote Peter Drucker, who said: "The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes … otherwise he is sure to be mediocre."

Google Inc. seems to agree as Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at the Silicon Valley giant, triggered some buzz recently when he was quoted in a New York Times column saying humility is one of the leading attributes he looks for in a candidate and especially in a leader, while expertise is the least important factor. 

In the start-up world, failure is also in. No sooner has an entrepreneur failed at a venture in Silicon Valley than he takes to the web — frequently to blogging sites like Medium, which hosts a continuous stream of essays on the topic — or to the stage at industry conferences like FailCon to narrate the failure and the growth he experienced as a result.

Telling the story of what went wrong is a way to wring insight from failure, but it’s also a way of proclaiming membership in a community of innovators who are unafraid of taking risks. Tech workers now use terms like “soft landing” (to fail gently without career harm) and “failing upward” (to fail with an immediate career upside).

Therefore, unless we change this limited culture towards one of recognizing the truth and of self-forgiveness, we will continue to encourage more of the same behavior, not of growth. 

It’s useful to talk about forgiving failure because whether you have many resources or very few, you’re almost certain to fail at some point in your career.

So you have failed again? You are broken? Humble yourself. You should expect nothing less. Embrace that fact, and thank God that he has shown you a small glimpse that you’re only human.

For until you reach the end of yourself, hopefully before you collapse into a broken heap of despair by your own efforts and strength, you won’t have the opportunity to rescue yourself by plunging into the depths of your self-pity and transfiguring it from the inside out, though it be painful to your pride.

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Thank you for reading. Tony