Failure and Success Go Together
We hear that failure leads to success and that the geniuses and billionaires of the world failed first then found their success.
We feel moments of failure in our work, our personal life, and in our macro-world as well. Failure and success: these antonyms are comingled and as hard as it may be, it’s up to us to accept that and let it guide us forward.
Small failures pave the way.
Think back to when you were first learning something: a language, to play the piano, to swing a golf club, speaking in public. It is unlikely that you were perfect the first time you tried, but when you got it right, it felt worth it.
I’ve seen this with my kindergartner. He’s a natural athlete who wants to be an engineer. He tells me that 2nd grade math is “easy” but learning to read and write is the most challenging, frustrating thing for him – it doesn’t come as naturally. Seeing the pride on his face when he reads a full sentence says it all: when he succeeds it softens the struggle.
As adults we experience similar ups and downs. For us these might be around a failed project or business venture, a marriage, or certain parenting moments. We must hold onto our willingness to fail along the way to better ourselves, even if it’s incredibly frustrating at times.
The link: success and failure.
We learn as we go, and we cannot expect success in every twist and turn of life. We’ll have big failures in life, many of which seem outside of our control, so it’s what we do when we fail that makes the most difference. Bill Gates said, “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” It takes making a choice between letting failure stop you in your tracks or choosing to overcome failure.
Data scientists at the Northwestern University and the University of Chicago found that the link between failure and success depends on how much the person learned from their previous failures and how they applied that knowledge going forward. This study reinforces what some of us have thought, but not always practiced: we must do our best to stop and learn from our failures rather than giving up. It’s a conscious, often difficult, choice we can make to help ourselves improve and move towards our goals.
Experiment without fear.
In a 2019 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote, "Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures." He said, "If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle." Some examples of short-lived experiments are the Amazon Fire phone and the Destinations hotel deal microsite, both of which they shut down after six months or less.
This is a great reminder that we can’t be held back by the fear of failure. Although our risks may not add up to those of Amazon, we must know and accept that not everything we try will work. In fact, we need to build a “stop and see if it’s working” step into our process to ascertain if we should be going forward or not. We should consider it a part of the process to cut our losses and move on when something isn’t working.
Have perspective.
Think about how colossal a failure can feel to each of us. Yes, feel it, but recognize that it just feels that big now and it will pass. My father told me when I was struggling with a business calculus class in college “work hard but remember that no one will ever ask you about what grade you got in that class”. He was right. I learned that the big picture can be more powerful than the minutia.
Ground yourself in what’s important to you. Try not to compare yourself to others as your bar may be lower or higher than someone else’s, and surely don’t allow others to tell you differently. Each thing we learn is a success. Each relationship we foster is a success. Each meeting that delivered value is a success. Each of our failures are unique to us as well, and that shapes us but doesn’t break us.
Many of us have a strong drive to get ahead but can get stuck in the muck of failure. Making the conscious choice to appreciate the small victories, accept our flops regardless of the magnitude, experiment without fear, and stay grounded in what really matters will lead us in the right direction.
Written by:
NATALIE JACKSON
Natalie is a practice director at Excelerate with has over 18 years of experience supporting large and small organizations, and over 25 years of experience eating a plant-based diet.