Most people deem failure as, well, just that, failure! Societal norms often view failure in a negative light and, as a result, cast this negativity upon the failing individual. Generally speaking, failure is associated with incompetence, inadequacy, or a lack of effort, whether those factors are true or not. What many fail to understand is that without failure, you can’t truly grow or adapt to the various situations you find yourself in. This is precisely why you need to work on embracing failure as a tool for growth.
Without it, you stagnate. There’s no growth. Without growth, you can’t move forward in life, not really. You begin to coast and stop taking risks and chances because the thought of failure begins to loom over you in ever-increasing ways.
It can be especially hard the older you get. After all, you’ve grown comfortable with your way of life. Making changes or taking risks doesn’t seem worth it. Instead of putting yourself on the path of failure, you continue to veer away from it, and as such, your life probably doesn’t change much.
What you need to understand, though, is that failure isn’t the enemy. It doesn’t have the last say in who you are and your endeavors unless you give it that power. Rather than give it that power, why not learn to use it as the necessary step toward success and self-improvement?
With that in mind, let’s examine the macro and micro scales of failure—how it impacts society and shapes us as individuals—as we uncover its role in influencing our lives for better or worse.
Redefining Failure
Historical Stigma of Failure
Viewing failure negatively isn’t anything new. Humans have generally struggled to see failure as anything but failure. Forget thinking of it in terms of a learning opportunity. If the king asks for results, you better get results; otherwise, it could mean a long, rough road ahead. That is, if you make it that far.
Fail the king, and you could lose favor and position. You could be stripped of your titles, lands, and influence, leading to poverty or exile, which means you would be shunned by those you considered your closest friends and allies.
Fail too hard, and you could receive severe punishment or imprisonment. In some instances, they might go as far as death to be sure you received your just reward and to use your death as an example of what will happen to others who can’t carry out the king’s commands.
Failure in Modern Contexts
Failure in business is no different. If you fail to meet certain expectations, there’s a chance you could be overlooked for specific promotions or opportunities, as the failure may create doubt about your abilities. Depending on how big the failure is, it could lead to demotions or termination.
Hopefully, if it’s the first time, that isn’t the case, but repeated failures can be inextricably linked to consequences, such as losing your job.
Losing your job may be warranted in the context of the situation. Just because we’re talking about embracing failure doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be consequences for your actions or inaction. No, these ideas are how humans deal with failure, but what we’re talking about now is more related to the macro-scale ideation of failure.
The Micro-Scale Impact of Failure
For the rest of this article, we’ll focus on the micro-scale impact of failure on you, the individual. If you don’t learn to embrace failure as a tool for growth, you’ll be more likely to fail again and again and again, eventually leading to the results discussed previously.
Why?
Because we tend to repeat lessons until we learn them.
You don’t need a king, business, work colleagues, significant other, kids, and friends to remind you of your failures. Your subconscious or even conscious mind often sets off the warning bells and fireworks displayed in big red letters across the sky that say “FAILURE,” just to remind you of how pathetic and feeble you are. Thanks, brain…
However, this is where you need to embrace failure. This is the moment when embracing failure can make all the difference in the world. It’s during this space and time that you get to decide if you will succumb to the belief that YOU are a failure. Not this event, situation, circumstance, relationship, or anything else you want to throw in there was a failure, but YOU are a failure because this “thing” was a failure.
Don’t associate the failures you experience in life with you being the failure. Your business venture didn’t work out as planned, so you consider yourself a failure. You didn’t get a scholarship because your grades weren’t good enough, and you consider yourself a failure. The job you were interviewing for passed over you, and as such, you see yourself as a failure. This is how many people view themselves after experiencing failure.
If you’ve ever been in that position, you might wonder how to leverage failure for success rather than let it steamroll you into negativity.
Leverage Failure for Success
Just because you experienced a failure or setback doesn’t mean YOU, the individual, are a failure. However, this requires you to embrace failure as a tool for growth.
Take a look at Thomas Edison. He’s used consistently as a shining beacon of hope for those struggling with failure because he failed often. The most famous story is about how he created the incandescent bulb. He said,
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”
– Thomas Edison
Oprah Winfrey was fired from her television news anchor position because she was “unfit for TV.” So, what did she do? She pivoted to daytime talk shows and created a billion-dollar media empire, and her “unfit for TV” looks and personality ran for 25 years as one of the highest-rated talk shows in American history.
Steve Jobs helped co-founded Apple but was fired due to conflicts with the board. This, however, allowed him to found NeXT and acquire a little company we know as Pixar. Eventually, he was brought back to Apple, where he led the company through one of its most innovative and profitable eras.
Fired from his newspaper job for his “lack of imagination and good ideas,” Walt Disney went on to create the empire we now know as Disney. Cut from his basketball team, Michael Jordan went on to become one of basketball’s greatest legends. Albert Einstein was labeled “slow” by teachers and failed his university entrance exam. Colonel Sanders was turned down over 1,000 times before he turned KFC into a global franchise.
There is story after story of individuals who tried and failed and tried again, only to fail again, but then continued trying until they made it. That’s just it, though. They didn’t give up. They refused to believe the lie that THEY were the failure.
Failure As an Event Vs. Failure As an Identity
Many times, we hold failure too close, as if it should be a part of us. The pain of it can sting in such a way that you might think, how can it be separate from you when it hurts so bad?
However, when you can learn to embrace failure as a tool for growth, you allow yourself space from that failure. You no longer hold it so close. It doesn’t mean the failure doesn’t sting. There may be some wounded pride or embarrassment, but even when dealing with those emotions, you can still hold your head up high and pivot your thoughts and feelings into a positive light.
You do this by understanding that failure is an event, not an identity. As soon as YOU identify with failure, that’s when it all begins to crumble down around you. If you can step outside of those negative feelings and stop berating yourself for a moment, you realize failure is merely an encapsulation of the event. You may have failed, sure, but as an individual, you are not a failure.
This doesn’t mean you weren’t the cause of the failure, but you don’t have to identify yourself as a failure. Those are two very different things. Understanding the psychology of failure can be very beneficial in helping you separate yourself from the event.
The Psychology of Failure
When you identify yourself as a failure, it’s generally because you begin to latch onto the negative feelings associated with the event. As mentioned earlier, you may feel embarrassed because of your performance and start to feel ashamed for not hitting your goals or doing what you said you would do.
The Emotional Impact of Failure
You might feel a sense of guilt for letting others down. Maybe you think that way because, ultimately, you let yourself down. Instead of letting it go, you begin to ruminate on the event, situation, or actions taken or not taken as you attempt to sort out how you could have let something like this happen in the first place.
The further down this road you travel, the more you begin to associate with self-blame and diminished self-esteem, which generates an increased sense of worry, fear, or anxiety. This results in an increased fear of failure, making it more difficult to take risks or step outside your comfort zone, and it’s this fear that often holds people back from exploring new opportunities or learning from their experiences.
The more worry, fear, and anxiety you experience, the more you begin to watch for and anticipate failure. You try to work extra carefully so as not to disrupt anything. As a result, you stop taking risks and chances, yet unknowingly, you invite more failure into your life.
It creates a focus loop where your fear of failure begins to narrow your focus to the point where you amplify setbacks, causing you to worry about them more.
Focus Loops and Mental Cycles
Here’s what I mean: I have a saying, “You focus on what you focus on,” meaning the more you focus on something, the larger it grows, so you tend to focus on it even more. Then, the more you focus on it, the more you experience it, so you focus on it more, and it loops in this never-ending cycle until you realize what you’re doing and work to break the cycle.
There’s a proclivity to act in this manner when you experience failure in your life. Some failures may be small, so they’re easier to overlook. Others may be much larger, and they may seem like you’re wearing VR goggles, and no matter where you look, that failure is always right there, staring you in the face, and it can trigger your fight, flight or freeze response.
Many times, it can cause you to freeze, resulting in you experiencing paralysis or inaction as a result of failure. Instead of moving or doing anything to progress, you freeze and sometimes retreat from various opportunities to shield yourself from having to deal with a similar situation again.
After all, if it happened once, what’s the chance it will happen a second time and then a third time?! So why even bother? It’s easier to run away or just not move.
This pattern of freezing or retreating usually stems from a fixed mindset that equates failure with personal inadequacy rather than a growth mindset. It’s a situation everyone has found themselves in before.
You either take the risk or play it safe. Many play it safe because they think if they take the risk and fail, it means they are a failure. But what if you could change your relationship to failure? What if you could induce a growth mindset instead?
Developing a Mindset for Embracing Failure
In her book Mindest: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck discusses neuroplasticity and the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset.
She argues that science has shown that you can choose the mindset you wish to have. You can choose a fixed mindset that doesn’t allow for growth or learning, and you can struggle through life as a result. On the other hand, you can choose to live with a growth mindset, and no matter what obstacles you face, you can find a way over them, around them, or through them.
However, this requires letting go of things you’re used to holding onto. It requires you to accept that you are a flawed human being, but that’s okay because when you begin to live with this mindset, you start to experience freedom.
Fear of Failure
Failure, or fear of failure, can inhibit the types of risks and the amount of risk you take in specific endeavors. It can also hinder your ability to learn from the various situations you encounter. This is living with a fixed mindset.
Living with a growth mindset means understanding the risk but allowing yourself to take it. In doing so, you open yourself up to learning based on the results of that risk. Maybe the risk was worth it, perhaps it wasn’t, but if you let the fear of failure hold you back, you’ll never know.
You may take the risk and fail! Then what? With a growth mindset, you move on. You note what worked and what didn’t, seek guidance, ask for help, and read up on whatever you are doing so that you can make better-informed decisions in the future.
It’s action-based as opposed to passive-based.
The question is, how do you get yourself to the point where you’re embracing failure rather than running from it, which is something we will discuss in next week’s newsletter.
Remember, failure isn’t just a one-time event—it’s a mindset challenge. When you can learn how to view and respond to failure, you unlock the door to growth, resilience, and freedom within yourself that you might not have known was there.
In the second part of this series, you’ll learn practical strategies to help you embrace failure as a tool for growth. Stay tuned, and as always, thank you for reading. I hope you have a fantastic day.
Josiah
