For most of us failure comes with baggage – a lot of baggage
– that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very
early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means
you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or – worse! – aren’t
smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This
perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to
parrot the oft-repeated arguments about the upside of failure. How many
articles have you read on that topic alone? And yet, even as they nod their heads
in agreement, many readers of those articles still have the emotional reaction
that they had as children. They just can’t help it: That early experience of
shame is too deep-seated to erase. All the time in my work, I see people resist
and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we
say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: It
hurts.
We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the
first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for
growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a
necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They
are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be
seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I
say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge
that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful
and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth.
To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both
the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.
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