THE NONLINEAR PATH 07: Why You Need To Fail A Lot More Than You Are
And Why The Odds Of Success Are Against You If You Don't
There have been a lot of layoffs lately, many of them en masse, in tech, automotive, apparel, outdoor, music, and retail just to name a few. On top of all we’ve been through in the past three years, it’s another tough blow and it hurts my heart to see fellow artists let go at a time when creative visions and ideas are in great need.
However, we are in a time of massive shift, the biggest I’ve seen in my lifetime, where business models are changing rapidly, companies are restructuring, AI is being primed to take over many human jobs, and the entire idea of “work” is morphing before our eyes into… what?.. we do not yet know.
The only thing that is certain is that we all need to learn to evolve….quickly.
In order to weather these shifts and grow stronger we need to accept unpredictability and constant change as the norm, and to do so we will need to embrace failure. We will need to develop a new relationship with what failure is and how we deal with it.
We need to learn to see failure for what it really is, the most valuable tool to achieve success.
How do you find yourself feeling about failure? Is it an “f” word to be avoided at all costs? Does the mere sound of the word dredge up some internal shame? Is it something you feel you relate to a little too much, or not enough? Failure is a loaded word full of preconceptions and judgments. It usually feels negative, wrong, something we strive to steer clear of if we can, although deep down we know we can’t. So we fear it even more.
Fear and failure are heavily linked, unfortunately, and become that way just through living life with others, through being taught to compare ourselves in order to feel validated. We need to uncouple these from each other and develop a new relationship with failure, one that is based in courage. We need to learn to see failure for what it really is, the most valuable tool to achieve success.
So where does our fear of failure come from? We are not born with it. As children we failed all the time. How many times did we fall down while learning to walk, jump or ride a bike? How much food did we cover ourselves in until we learned to use a spoon, and isn’t it fun to watch a child delight in getting messy?
We couldn’t color inside the lines for years or write our name very well, but we also didn’t stop trying….until somebody encouraged us to do so, until we learned to compare ourselves with others and make a judgment upon that comparison. Until we realized that we were not doing it “perfectly” and somehow developed a belief that this was bad.
“Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. I’m sure a large part of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorously based on performance and punishes those who do not do well. Another large share of it comes from overbearing or critical parents who don’t let their kids screw up on their own often enough, and instead punish them for trying something new or not preordained. And then we have the mass media that constantly expose us to stellar success after success, while not showing us the thousands of hours of dull practice and tedium that were required to achieve that success.” -Mark Manson, The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*uck
We learn through our culture that success comes from luck, talent, charisma, money, being “discovered” by someone else. We give away our own power in believing that success comes this way, that we have no real control over it.
We also have a cultural belief that if you put in the hard work, the time, the focus, and stick with it that you will eventually be rewarded. This is just another form of giving your power away in thinking that some external force will hand you the reward, the raise, promotion, relationship, fulfillment you were counting on. However, after decades of work many of us find ourselves without those rewards, feeling jilted and jaded and taken advantage of.
The only way to make the hard work worth it is to make sure you are spending that time doing something you love and are passionate about. Something that makes the rough patches and setbacks doable because the joy of the work and the goal are so important.
However, we also live in a culture that does not value and or encourage us to pursue our passions. Many of us don’t even know what our true passions are. Out of fear of survival, and fear of failure, we teach our children to go after a career path with stability. “Being a fashion designer is too competitive.” “You have to be really, really good if you want to make it as an artist.” “You can’t make any money as a musician”. These statements are false but made frequently out of fear. They perpetuate fear in the next generation of creators, robbing the world of ideas and creations that will never come to light.
Our parents, grandparents, teachers make these statements because they do not want to see us fail, but by not following our passions and gifts we are failing ultimately, and we will never truly be happy. We need to do what we love and fail - lots, fast, and in all the ways we can think of.
Failure Is The Only Path To Success
I’ve been learning to embrace failure on a new level and it’s making all the difference. Growing up, failure was never really an option for me. I was always very creative, an artist. I had loving, artistic parents who let me try whatever I wanted. However, I had a handicap. Not a medically-defined one, but a personal psychological handicap….I was pretty good at everything I did.
My distinct artistic abilities were apparent since kindergarten, but I was also a good student, good at reading and writing but also science and math. I was physically adept at sports, dancing, skating, anything I tried. The handicap was that this made me both terrified of failure and kept me from learning how to work hard when things got rough….and they did. I was a perfectionist out of survival. It was life or death for me.
I tracked my fear of failure and need for being perfect to my earliest childhood, before the age of five. It took me well into adulthood and lots of therapy to track down the cause because I had no real memories of what happened. I knew that my mom married my dad when I was 5 and that he adopted me shortly after. I knew that my biological father had never really been in my life.
What I had to come to grips with as an adult was that I was abandoned by my biological father and that abandonment caused me to always feel like I needed to be perfect. Making mistakes, causing waves, being a problem was tantamount to be left behind, forsaken, forgotten.
So, for me failure equaled abandonment, and if you know anything about anthropology and human culture, abandonment usually equaled death. Even with a wonderful new dad and a very stable home in place, those early experiences during prime development were ingrained, cellular. I had to learn how to understand them, work with them, and turn them to my advantage.
Failure is one step closer to success.
Embracing failure for me was terrifying. I chose to study martial arts in my early twenties to tackle fear in general. It was cool, I wanted to be strong mentally, physically, and spiritually, and I wanted to be a badass. Training martial arts makes you face all your fears and it is what brought my fear of failure to light. It was my greatest fear. Not of fighting the big guys, not of getting hit, or getting hurt. I was terrified of looking foolish, of making mistakes. I fed greedily off of praise for my “natural abilities”.
Eventually, it got hard, on so many levels….physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, but I pushed through many walls and learned to face myself. I was fortunate enough that I had found something that I loved so much that I never considered quitting. More than thirty years later I am still training, still learning, still facing fears and failures.
In class, our teacher would often say “failure is one step closer to success”. During new exercises she would catch me at the back and say “stop watching and trying to figure it out before you do it. Stop trying to be perfect, just get out there and do it.”
She would tell me in order to get better at something I had to do it over and over and over, with no end. “You do it one time, you’re 1x better. You do it one hundred times, you’re 100x better.” In other words, my getting better directly correlated to how many times I did something. If I gave up, of course I wouldn’t get better, but if I stuck with it, getting better was guaranteed.
Each time you do something is a failure, a step on a path that has no end. You can only ever be somewhere on that path, either standing still or moving forward. The journey is the destination, there is never an arrival. Success is the journey itself.
“Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something.” -Mark Manson, The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*uck
Fear of failure holds us back and keeps us from fulfilling our calling. We must rethink and shift how we view failure, how we hold it in our minds. We must learn to define it for ourselves and to embrace it.
Failure: Success In Disguise
Failure is success, in disguise. Just doing is the success. Therefore failure is not really failing. Failure is a natural result of doing. Just like we must know night to understand day, dark to know light, we must know failure to understand success.
Like the yin yang symbol, failure and success are intertwined, inseparable. Each is also the other. White can be success, but it has failure in it. Black can be failure but success sits right in the center. Success can ultimately be a failure, and therefore failure can ultimately be a success. It’s really how you decide to look at it and define it for yourself. Neither is bad unless you choose to label it as such. They both just are, they exist in harmony with each other. Our job is to find our own balance.
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. -Joseph Campbell
Failures, set-backs, layoffs, divorces and such are actually gifts, signals and doorways for movement, learning and growth. They push us into the places we fear the most, the very dark caves we need to enter to find, and sometimes fight, ourselves. Like Luke Skywalker entering the cave to face his father, ultimately himself, or Aragorn forcing himself to move forward on The Path Of The Dead to become the leader he feared but was meant to be, we must find our way forward through failure to our place. We must move.
Fear Not Failure: Beware Stagnation
Failure itself Indicates movement. It means that you did something, it may not have worked yet, but you tried, you moved. The only true failure is that of doing nothing.
I fail every week. Every week I sit down to write, a major part of my new job since I turned pro this year. I am not a great or highly accomplished writer. My titles may not hit the mark, my content may lack a certain cohesiveness or not resonate with my readers. I am sure I am committing plenty of treasonous writing mistakes, but I have something to say, a piece of information or perspective that has helped me or others along the way and I need to get it out.
So I sit down and work in chunks of time until something materializes that feels like what I am trying to express, in my own words and in my own voice.
I have to work hard to remove judgment, to look at it objectively and drown out any voices that may keep me from finishing. Hitting the publish button is nerve-wracking but the feeling of fulfillment once I let it go is amazing. I have succeeded in my goal of putting one article out into the world that week on a topic that is important to me. If it helps one person in some way, my success has grown exponentially and I know that if I stick with it I will get better.
You are one hundred percent successful as soon as you send your project off into the world. Regardless of how it is perceived. -Rick Rubin
It’s the only way I will get better and I have chosen to do it publicly, in front of everyone. This choice was a huge one for me and incredibly important due to my lifetime of perfectionist tendencies.
In January of 2021, going into the second year of the pandemic, I chose to do something new, something I’d never done before and had little idea how to do. I chose to start a monthly online speaker series that would run live on the Zoom platform we were all just getting used to. I was relaunching a new version of an old event that used to be a yearly multi-day conference on design and creativity because I was asked to.
Everyone was feeling isolated and wanted some way to connect. I had shut down the business two years before and was reluctant to start again but I was also feeling the personal conflict between working as a designer making more stuff and the need for human connection and focus on people.
So I decided instead of curating and designing an event of speakers, panels and workshops, one where I was behind the scenes, I would move to the forefront as interviewer. I would choose and develop the topics and guests, write the content, market the event, and conduct the live interview complete with an online audience. Afterwards I would edit the video and put it up on the YouTube channel.
I wasn’t sure what format the event should take each month. The online event world was truly the wild west at this point. So I decided to let myself try something new each event, to throw things against the wall to see what stuck.
I got a lot of feedback and criticism which I had to learn how to process properly, but most importantly I gave myself permission to fail publicly.
I literally said that to myself… and others. When I did, I noticed something interesting. My comment often made people very uncomfortable, prompting them to say things like “I don’t see it as a failure at all!” or “I wouldn’t call it a failure.” The failure term is what bothered people, as if it were a negative judgment which perhaps might make me quit.
However, in this case it was an important statement that I needed to make. I needed to be OK with calling it failure, I needed to be brash, harsh, and very direct, and just own it. I needed to embrace failing and I really needed everyone to see me do it.
It built a resilience in me, an I don’t give a f*ck attitude that helped me get over myself and my limiting perfectionism. It allowed me to have more compassion, and respect, for hard work and putting oneself out there.
The key thing about this story is that it made me move. I had already been feeling stuck when the pandemic hit. I was wanting big growth and I knew I needed to take some big risks. I just didn’t know what those risks should be or what direction to take them, so I just started to move in a direction, any direction.
That movement led me to the next step, and the next. While the path was extremely foggy, gradually it began to unfold more clearly in front of me as I moved forward.
Bruce Lee would always tell his students to “be like water”, as would my teacher, and as do I. The energy of water is the basis of martial arts. It is flow, internally and externally, pulling from the movement and strength of water. Water has no fear, no judgment, no ego, it just is and it just does. It is always moving, around, over, under, and through.
Even still, calm water is moving. Flowing water is clear, stagnant water is murky. When I feel stuck, the first thing I do is move, physically, and eventually things start to clear and answers start to come. It’s why we tend to get ideas and clarity in the shower, immersed in flowing water.
Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Publicly
Failure is inevitable. To evolve quickly you need to move, fail fast, learn from it, and do it again. You increase your odds of success by increasing the amount of times you try and fail. All people who have had success have had a long list of failures behind it to get there. It’s in the odds…the more you do something, the better you’ll get, the more chances you’ll have of success. Most of us give up too soon, most of us talk ourselves out of things before we even try.
Fail publicly in front of others. It will build your resilience. You will find more often than not that instead of being met with judgment, you will be met with people who are inspired by your courage. You will be giving people permission to also try things they are afraid to do. You will in turn lift the level of your community, by example. You will start to ignore the naysayers until they eventually just go away.
Developing a healthy relationship to failure means developing a healthy relationship to yourself. The biggest failure beyond doing nothing is neglect, ignoring your calling, your path, not hearing your own voice, neglecting yourself. Listen to yourself, follow your heart and embrace failure. Understanding that failure is a crucial part of the process allows you to be more objective and less judgmental, of yourself and others. You will become more compassionate, and you will develop the resilience necessary to go after what you want and succeed.
Thank you for this, my amazing, creative and loving daughter! You have so much to give to the world, for you have given me far more than you know. Write on!
inspiring and motivating as always! you should write a book 🤓