Embrace Failure.
Failure is the mother of creation, and learning from it is the challenge. Failure is constant pressure pushing your success with a passion. It’s persistent while success is fleeting. This is not some academic lesson you learn, it’s something in your biology. It’s an autonomic function like breathing and balance. You have failed your way to success from the beginning of your life. You just grew up and out of learning it’s lessons and the thrill of failing.
Riding a bicycle is an experience of falling over and over again. Everyone falls once the training wheels are off. Some fall many times. Most never give up until they are cruising along. Why? The payoff is huge. Its freedom, it’s a social right of passage, its fun and it’s free!
So when do we lose this ambition to learn from our failure? When we have something to lose. When our freedoms and opportunity are compromised as social judgement rewards winning vs losing. We lose prestige and money, and we are no longer free.
So far so good. We fail. We learn. So what?
Failing and learning requires that we build a community around of trust and support. A community that understands and admits failure. I often ask people I work with how they handled their last nervous breakdown. If they respond with I’ve never had one, I choose not to include them in my community. While not the only metric, it is a good one to start with. It comes to this. If you have not failed, as in a nervous break down, it’s hard to have empathy with those who have had a nervous breakdown. Let’s face it, in a room full of people, who are more worried about failing, who’s going to blink first? Who’s going to be the one to mentor the others to success? That is how Alcoholics anonymous starts you off. Admission of failure opens the door for empathy and winning.
So surround your self with people who can admit failure and show how they learned from it.
“It is what it is”, a motto to let go by. Failure has its context. Sometimes you can control it, sometimes you can’t. When I learned to ride a bike, I lived in San Francisco, where I was born. Oh, the magnificent hills. Oh the frightful falls. I could have learned in San Jose I suppose, but that would not have prepared me to live in San Francisco. All my family and friends learned on those hills. So I had a social driver. And in the end, riding down hill was crazy fun and like flying. In the end, it is what it is. The context of failing and learning in San Francisco gave me the endurance and skill to manage those outrageous hills. That was exciting.
Contrast that with my flat land friends and family. They did not have this context. They rode bikes all the time, but the hills were daunting if not scary. There were no end of excuses as to why they could not ride on any given day. It was obvious to me, they were afraid. Afraid of falling, which they had left behind, afraid of the pain, physically, socially and emotionally. It was only with empathy I could assure them to risk the learning. It is what it is. I rode at your home, I’ll teach you to ride at mine. It’s knowing to admit failure is possible, that unlocks success.
As it turns out, it was easy to learn on those big hills after all.
So, learn to fail. Accept it is what it is. Use that empathy to bring others to success by guiding them through failure. Only then can we have a culture of failure that leads us to success as a team.
