How to Succeed in Your Failures
There may be no better idea of failure than when a project you were working on explodes spectacularly in front of an audience of thousands. When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk does this – as his company may have done at the very end of Wednesday’s launch of its Starship prototype – the agony of failure becomes tactile in the fiery towers and clouds of burning shrapnel streamed live around the world.
Musk is a billionaire industrialist and audacious public figure known for his dizzying success in many industries. And yet he still fails frequently, sometimes even seeing his ambitions to build rockets that would ferry humans to Mars literally flammable.
He’s not the only successful tycoon or icon to sometimes wallow in the pits of failure. Thomas Edison is famous for admitting his closeness to failure ; for many years JD Salinger’s literary genius went unnoticed as his stories were continually rejected by the New Yorker; Michael Jordan missed his high school basketball team on his first try.
We don’t always need to focus on the efforts of wealthy tycoons – especially those with a reputation as ambiguous as Musk – or dreamy inventors or legendary athletes. There is a lesson to be learned from the stumbling blocks that the highly successful and the anonymous alike overcome. Failure haunts us all, no matter how many triumphs we enjoy throughout our lives. But failure can be instructive. There are often important lessons to be learned from our failures, if not glimpses of success – consider the fact that this SpaceX rocket did something unprecedented before the explosion – but recognizing this fact means rethinking the very concept of what it means to fail.
Failure is a constant, so don’t dwell on it.
The habitual cliches of failure abound regardless of context, but especially at work. Fail early and often is a concept to reward young workers who are trying to gain a foothold in their jobs. “Acceptance of failure” is easily applicable to entrepreneurs who are betting on their early attempts to build something that will hold up. Your admission of failure is supposed to be, for a moment, a stepping stone to the idealized notion of continued success.
But in life, things are rarely so simple. According to Ross McCummon, author of “ Works Well With Others,” corporate etiquette guidelines, success comes with failure more often than you might expect. However, he says, it’s actually a good thing – if failure can be interpreted as a valid dilemma.
“Failure is not a dead thing,” he tells Lifehacker. “This is a living being and you can draw energy from it. But the longer you wait to think about it, the more calcified it gets. And then just a big dead thing happened, not a vital part of your present and future. “
A careful approach is key to understanding how mistakes can help you in the short and long term. McCummon emphasizes a more proactive approach, in which you recognize setbacks as they arise and discuss them honestly with colleagues and superiors.
He says:
It’s best to recognize success in failure right after you’ve realized what is happening as failure. And maybe even during. I think early failure and failure often works like a philosophy if you also evaluate early and often and communicate your grades to your colleagues and even your boss.
Not everyone can afford such a comfortable workplace and friendly, understanding bosses and colleagues. But you can avoid the black cloud of failure in your mind by broadening your vision of what failure means.
Accept that your career won’t be linear.
“I got fired from almost every job I had due to budget or staff cuts,” says Sean Abrams, editor of the Ask Men website. As a 29-year-old millennial writer, Abrams is no stranger to the turmoil that has hit the digital media industry, let alone the flows that have swept the broader job market since the Great Recession of 2008. For those in his position, setbacks often arise from circumstances beyond their control, the recognition of which can provide a valuable perspective.
“Sometimes the factors that led to your failure really have nothing to do with you at all. You just got the short end of the stick, says Abrams.
Marking a failed venture as a failure is too simplistic to be of great instructive value. McCummon invites us to “reject the idea of phases such as failure and success and play a longer game” in which we accept that our career arcs will be anything but predictable.
He tells Lifehacker:
As we progress through our career, we first think of it as a kind of line that must constantly climb up. Of course it doesn’t. He does not always rise up, and sometimes goes to the side and fixates on himself. Maybe you’ve tried a new career for several years, maybe you’ve been unemployed for a while. Careers are not linear. And I think this is a useful context for assessing failure.
One way to rethink failure, especially in a culture that overemphasizes success, is to think of it in less harsh terms. Instead of dwelling on the serious consequences of a perceived failure, think of failure as a cautionary mistake. Mistakes are normal and excusable, and they happen on a regular basis. People who make mistakes are usually not identified, and McCummon believes that you should admit your mistakes without apology:
“Any successful person, young or old, can make mistakes flawlessly … you can argue that a career is just a series of mistakes that you make and turn into success.”
With this mindset, it won’t be difficult to succeed in anticipated setbacks.