How, and why, we should be embracing failure
How, and why, we should be embracing failure
One of the things that makes life interesting and worth living is the process of pursuing the un-known.
It could be picking up a new hobby, developing a new skill, choosing a new job, travelling to a new place. These are all experiences which force you into an uncomfortable position, where you are forced into making mistakes and the possibility of embarrassment, but through that discomfort comes the opportunity to experience growth.
Today, I want to write about why we need to be adventuring into the unknown and experimenting with failure, as well as why failure is so uncomfortable. I want to explore what pitfalls we run into when committing to new pathways, as well as ways to frame your failures to help alleviate some of the stress and anxiety that venturing into the unknown brings.
First, I want to talk about why you need to be doing new things, and by extension, failing and very embarrassing yourself.
The natural state of the universe is change. If you are familiar with the writings of Marcus Aurelius, you will know how he describes the universe or ‘the whole’ as permanently young, because the atoms and molecules that make up our universe are constantly changing and re arranginge themselves to create new structures and formations.
Nothing is stagnant nor permanent, and everything you are is subject to change. Your atoms in your own body are constantly replacing and leaving you, holding your form but changing what makes you, you.
This is all to say, that change is the default state of the world. To be stagnant, is to be dying. The process of voluntarily moving into the unknown and forcing adaptations, both physical and mental, is what makes life interesting. Further more, the ability to create future projections of ones own self into the future, and hypothesise about what skills and attributes may increase the quality of ones own life, is a uniquely human feature.
Only humans are able to create theories of what they should learn, and then use deliberate practice to develop these skills. To learn is to be human.
We know this inherently from the media we consume. The heroes journey is a story archetype whereby a character begins in a place of comfort, and through trials and tribulations learn new lessons and skills that help them achieve a goal of significance. Character development, and the pain it comes with, is what makes the stories of heroes and villains that we consume so interesting.
Your own life is no different.
You should look at your life as a narrative, with a beginning middle and end. Just like a great novel or film, your story is only as interesting as the adversity you are able to overcome.
The movie that got me into the gym was Creed II. In the movie, Adonis Creed has just become the world heavy weight champion of boxing. In a fight against his arch nemesis, he is defeated in spectacular fashion after he lets his passion and need for revenge over take him. He then has to work his way from the bottom, seeking forgiveness from those he loves, and importantly himself.
The movie has an epic training montage, where Adonnis trains in the desert, isolated from his family. He pushes his body to physical extremes, but through the process adjusts his mind to let go of the fear, and the need to prove himself.
Adonis wins his fight, but as cliche as it sounds, his true victory was internal. The payoff is so satisfying because we see Adonnis fall to his lowest point, and crawl back to the light. The overcoming of adversity is what makes the stories we watch so fascinating.
When I watched this film, I was 17. Slightly overweight, no muscle, and highly insecure. I sat there with a family sized packet of pods and a large mocha, and realised that the story of my life was not one fraction as engaging as what I was watching. It dawned on me that by indulging in simple pleasures, I was missing out on something greater. This is what pushed me to start working out, and going to the gym.
Let me not overstate anything. It’s not as if my life changed drastically in a sudden flash because I saw a Michael B Jordan training montage. I did start going to the gym, but I struggled to remain consistent. I still found myself indulging in meaningless activities, and abdicating responsibility I would have been better off accepting. I merely had a realisation that challenge instigated meaning.
Perhaps you can relate to this. We all know, at some level, that staying comfortable is the wrong thing to be doing. At some level, we understand that challenge is what forces growth. Yet, ignoring the voice in your head that pleads for adventure is easy, because providing the necessary activation energy is difficult.
Going down the difficult path, is hard. That’s the whole point. A lot of the discussion around failure, pain, and adversity stops there. No pain no gain, no glory without suffering. The idea of ‘doing hard things’ is not novel, it’s all over our media, talked about by self help gurus, and glorified by successful individuals.
What I find particularly interesting however, is what ‘doing hard things’ really means. What does it mean to struggle through adversity?
Life, is hard.
Whether you choose or not, you will have to overcome difficulty in life. That’s the way it is. That’s the by-product of living in a universe where change is the standard. People get sick, people die, things crumble. The idea of ‘entropy’ is that systems always move towards less organised states. Therefore, you can not escape suffering, or the eventuality that you will die.
Why then, in a world where suffering is assured, why would you voluntarily accept more? Why would you choose to pursue difficult, uncomfortable adventures? This is a complicated, philosophical question. An initial answer, is that intentional effort can help us maintain a state of order. Consider your body. It will deteriorate, and fade, and die. However, intentional effort with your nutrition, sleep, exercise will all help it maintain a strong and capable form for a very long period of time, increasing the amount of years worth living we have. How interesting is it that difficulty strengthens the body, rather than deteriorates it.
Life is hard, sure. But you have the ability to choose your hard. By choosing to go to the gym, make small, dedicated efforts to sharpening your body and keeping yourself active, you pick the suffering of discipline and short term pain. On the other hand, make the choice to not exercise (not making a choice, is a choice) and you will recieve the suffering of low confidence, disease, and a non functional body.
In addition to this, the very nature of choosing to do difficult tasks makes them bearable. The voluntary choice to uphold a standard or action, simply because you should, makes that action easier. By choosing to live your life to the highest ideal, one not of comfort and status quo, but of responsibility and duty, you hold yourself to a higher internal standard, one that raises your own self perception and allows you to brace the difficulties in life with the confidence that you have always chosen the difficult, but correct, path. This is an antidote to shame, and destroys lesser versions of yourself.
How well and good, but we still must answer, what does it mean to do difficult things? A hard, physical gym session is obviously hard. It’s physiologically measurable. Our heart rate goes up, our muscles become sluggish and filled with lactic acid, our vision narrows, our breathing becomes short. We know what physical pain feels like. The problem is that ‘hard’ came come up in malicious, and mysterious ways.
One thing I used to say to myself when I began to wake up at 5am to train for my IronMan, was that whenever I found a reason to procrastinate, whenever I complained I was tired or that I could skip this session for one reason or another, I found myself understanding that THIS is what hard is.
See people think hard is usually physical. It’s being tired after hours of studying, or tired from a session in the gym. These are the obvious side effects of difficult pursuits, but they aren’t the worst bits. The truth is, anyone can do a long study session, or a killer workout in the gym and be crushed. Anyone can go 100% out for a short time. But the type of hard we are talking about, the type of suffering we are talking about, is going 75% for years, and seeing little for your efforts.
Furthermore, hard is not just draining. It could be embarrassment, being seen as a failure. It is losing friends because they aren’t right for you. It’s saying no to things that might be fun in the short term, for a more meaningful long term gain. Further still though, why do things things hurt us?
Adversity, and failure is the confrontation with your own ego. If you are someone who’s found a degree of success in a pursuit, any pursuit, then you have the experience to know that you are someone who can be good at something. If you got good grades, are strong, are a capable athlete, can speak multiple languages, are good at instruments, then you have evidence that you are someone who has capabilities.
Now, being good at something doesn’t make you good at everything. Whilst it may sound obvious, the conscious decision to try and attempt something you are objectively not good at can be a threat to this self identity of yours, an attack to your ego. If you consider yourself someone who’s fit because they can lift a lot, you might find it hard to comprehend that you are not a very good runner. This may then, cause you to say things like “I’m not build to be a runner” or “running just isn’t for me”, or worse, “runners are stupid, what’s the point of being fit if you don’t look big”. It’s easy to become defensive, because you yourself can’t handle the possibility that you are not good at everything.
Then comes the embarrassment. Being at the bottom of a hireachy isn’t fun. No one likes being the worst at something, especially if you have a competitive instinct. This is extended by the folk around us, who knowingly or unknowingly chastise or bring down beginners. This is not obvious to spot, but those who overly gate keep or critique beginner mistakes are they themselves contributing to these situations.
There is also the feeling of wasting your time, and not being able to believe that you will get better at things. We have all been there. Why bother going to the gym if you never really believe you’ll reach your goals. I could never be strong, or look good without my shirt off, why bother? Or, I’ve been going to the gym for 6 months now, and it still feels hard. Clearly this isn’t for me. There are however, ways we can frame failure to help us overcome our insecurities and fears. As said before, to fail is to be challenged, and to be challenged is to be human.
One of the most helpful things I have heard is that advice is a form of procrastination.
Often, we believe that if we have perfect information, that if we just learned everything, then there would be no chance that we fail. There would be no risk, and therefore no downside to attempting something new.
For instance, if I wanted to start a new business, I must learn some new information about good ways to begin. This is fair enough, and demonstrates foresight and diligence in completing research. There however, comes a time where you just need to start. The reason is, that no matter how many books you read, or podcasts you listen to, you will not stop yourself from failing. You will mess something up.
And why shouldn't you? Messing it up, is the fun bit. This is where you make the journey worth while, this is where you give people something to buy into. It’s not just that perfect information won’t stop you from failing, its that you don’t want it to. Learn to lean into this failure, accept it, treat it like a friend. Stop procrastinating your embarrassment under thinly veiled excuses.
One way to “lean in” to this failure, is to place your attention on your inputs, and not the outputs. This is very common with physical goals. If I want to run a race, like a marathon, its so easy to get obsessed with times and targets that I must hit. This is a guarantee that I will feel disappointment, as for any number of reasons its very easy to not achieve these objective measures. Instead, re frame your targets as inputs. I want to train 5 days a week for this marathon, or put x number of kms into my prepreation. I’m not arguing there is no place for targets, you must set goals and you must try to reach them, but focusing on your inputs whilst trying to reach these milestones offsets your feelings of failure, as you can remain proud of your efforts and leverage your inputs to extract lessons.
It is also useful, to remember that, at the end of the day we all die. I say this as it is a useful way to remember that our time is finitie, and our end could come at any moment. Do not let this be a source of concern, but rather use it as motivation to stop putting off your failures for fear of failure. If I told you you could be successful in whatever field you wanted, but it would take 10, major embarassing failures, would you be okay with that? If success was guaranteed, and marked not by time or by attempts, but by failures, would you not do everything you could to get those 10 failures out of the way as fast as possible?
Perhaps you wouldn’t end up exactly where you wanted, but I guarantee if you tried at something, all in, and failed 10 times (made 10 businesses, tried to finish a race 10 times, tried to hit a time 10 times, tried to make a song 10 times, tried to graduate 10 times), you would end up very close to what you envision success to be (mentioning nothing of how your idea of success would change, or how it would likely take far less than 10 attempts). Why then, are you not rushing to meet failure as fast as possible?
The reason, is that failure, and effort, takes time. Remember the motivational scene in creed 2? It lasts about 5 minutes. In life, it could be 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years. It wears down on you. There is not antidote to this, and I’m still learning how to address this myself, but what I know is that if you stop trying, your outcome is guaranteed. Might as well get to work.
The relationship you build around failure, how comfortable you are making mistakes and not knowing everything, is one of the best things you can build to help escalate the rate at which you learn. A master in any given field is someone who has made all the mistakes there are to learn. Get out, get learning, get failing.