Are You Failing Enough to Succeed?

By Cameron John Robbins

There is a story which may be apocryphal, that has been popular for a long time in the self-help/success arena. According to the story, a young and ambitious executive goes to the president of the company and asks how he can rise quickly to the top. The president tells him the best way to the top is to fail faster.

Huh? Aren’t we supposed to despise and avoid failure at all costs? Does this story mean we should be trying to fail? Why? We don’t want to fail at anything. We want to succeed. So, does failure somehow help us to do that?

What makes this story great is that it expresses a powerful truth that actually flouts common thinking. The truth is that failure does indeed help us to succeed. At least it can if we let it, or if we use it correctly. While the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to success is paved with failure.

Before we dive too far into this concept, let’s define what failure is and how it happens. A failure occurs when we try to arrange or obtain a specific outcome, but that outcome does not materialize in spite of our efforts. Failure is always connected to an intention, albeit one that has yet to be realized. To fail means you tried something new, something you haven’t mastered yet.

In other words, you wanted something. You made the best plan you knew how to, and you followed that plan in the pursuit of your goal. That alone deserves congratulations rather than criticism. So, you fell short this time. You lacked something. And……... this is me failing to see the shameful tragedy in that.

A huge number of people never get what they want most, because they’re too afraid of failing in the attempt. So, if you failed in the pursuit of what you want, it’s evidence that you were braver than most people. Good on you! But your attempt failed this time, and the outcome you wanted didn’t materialize. What does that mean?

All it really means is that you need a better plan. You made the best plan you could at the time, and you gave it your best effort. Failure may not be an option, as the saying goes, but it is always a possibility. Yet failure reveals the flaws in our plans. It shows us the gaps in our knowledge or current skills. Or maybe it reminds us of things we forgot to think about, factors we didn’t sufficiently consider. In doing these things, failure empowers us to make a new and improved plan, and to try again with better odds of success. Does that sound like something to be afraid or ashamed of?

The trouble is that we often are afraid of failure, terribly afraid. And we can easily feel ashamed when we do inevitably fail at things. Most of that fear probably traces back to childhood. Your parents may have been more or less critical of the things you did wrong. But one kind of experience you likely had was the recurring school pageant where the teacher handed back graded homework assignments, tests and report cards.

There was the intense anxiety while waiting for your turn to learn your academic fate. You may have beamed with pride and relief to see you’d gotten high marks. Or you may have wished you could vanish through a hole in the floor if your grades were poor. That was because as soon as each student knew their own score, they were immediately and intensely interested in how well everyone else had done.

You may well remember the jeering remarks and mocking Ooohs that spontaneously erupted from the class when the poorest performing students were identified. Who wouldn’t become mortally afraid of being on the receiving end of that? Especially if it happened regularly.

Failure is your friend

It may take a serious rearrangement in thinking for you to implement this, but I want to recommend a new way of looking at failure. Firstly, understand that whenever you identify a goal, you are creating conditions that will reveal failures. You must learn to be okay with that. The goal may be an achievement, like gaining an award, or it may be the adoption of certain standards of behavior. Either way, you have created an impersonal but merciless judge of your actions. That judge will tell you when you made it and when you didn’t.

If you can get over being intimidated by that, you’ll be well on your way to being capable of anything. The judgements that come from a standard are not meant to punish or humiliate you. All they are doing is letting you know where you are in real time. You’re doing well in some areas, and you need to put in more work or rethink your strategy in others. That’s all.

Failure has nothing to do with your worth as a human being. It’s just giving you feedback on how well you did in what you attempted. That feedback empowers you to redeploy your energies for better effect. Or as the Navy SEALs put it, there are only two ways of doing things – the right way, and again. If you don’t get the outcome you want, you didn’t do something the right way.

If you have ever seen a seismograph machine working, you’ll know that a marking needle weaves back and forth across a center point on a moving scroll of paper. The farther the needle moves away from the center point, the greater the seismic activity. Within a certain range, those deviations are nothing to worry about. Beyond that, the deviations from the norm are more serious.

Pursuing a goal is a lot like that for each of us. The center point represents the goal or standard we have set. The variable path of the marking needle is like our actual performance. Sometimes we’re close to the standard, and sometimes we are way off. What most people do is look at their performance relative to their standard, and then mark the greatest deviations as failures. Fair enough.

The trouble is that only tells part of the story of your actual performance. If your performance is like the marking needle and your standard is the center point, then for every deviation you make, you had to first intersect with the ideal. Same standard, same performance. You can put your attention on the failures if you want to, but you should also mark the intersections where you succeeded, if only temporarily. Those successes count too.

There is one other important point to consider. For every deviation the needle makes from the standard, there is a point where it turns back toward the center. In terms of your actual performance, those points deserve to be highlighted as Still Trying. As Winston Churchill said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”. Still Trying counts. It counts a great deal.

Let’s consider a few more relevant quotes:

“If you are not willing to be a fool, you can’t become a master” – Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Part of the price of success is being willing to risk looking like a fool over your failures along the way. You may not actually look like a fool for failing. Most people may not notice your failure at all. But you have to be willing to take the risk, no matter what happens.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first” – Brian Tracy

“Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you can learn to do it well” – Zig Zigler

The reason I used two virtually identical quotes in a row is because I want you to really ponder that idea. It’s an old analogy, but consider babies learning to walk. They cannot walk to begin with, but they see people all around them who can. That vision gives them the desire to walk like everyone else. They try and they fall countless times.

I have seen babies become angry and frustrated over falling again, but I have never seen one become embarrassed or ashamed of their failure. Nor have I ever seen or heard of a baby who was physically capable of walking simply give up trying to because of how many times they had failed in the past. That is something we learn to do later. And it’s something we should all unlearn.

So, what does it mean to fail faster, as the proverbial company president suggested? It means to push harder to expand the limits of your competence. It means to go looking for what you don’t yet know in relation to achieving your goals. It means to actively direct your energies to where they will do the most good.

Learn from your failures. Chew on and digest them until they give up their lessons. Use those lessons to make a better plan, and go for it again. Then forget the failure and move on. Lastly, don't take them personally. Above all, give yourself full credit for where you do succeed, and for refusing to give up.

N.B. For any educators reading this, I have a special challenge for you. Stop marking what your students got wrong on homework and tests. Throw away your red pencils and the stigma that goes with them. Instead, use a green pencil and make a big, fat check next to everything your students get RIGHT.

The essential thing your students need to know is where they are doing well, and where they need to put in more effort. Getting back an assignment that clearly indicates that they got more things correct than they got incorrect will be far more encouraging and empowering. It will inspire them to strive for more, instead of demoralizing them into accepting defeat.