Why We Shouldn't Fear Failure

I used to believe so completely in the concept of failure.

It is a threat that looms over us from an early age. When we begin to understand what it is to not live up to another’s expectation, or our own expectation, or for something to not go as planned, the fear of failure pushes many of us to action. In this sense, a fear of failure can seem motivating. In fact, it is a commonly used source of motivation. We frighten people with the worse-case scenario and share scary stories of those who have failed as a way to inspire action and drive. But, in reality, this approach is unsustainable. It is unsustainable because this fear-based drive exhausts us, making us feel like we are always just one step ahead of catastrophe. When, inevitably, mistakes are made, or things do not go as planned, we are flooded with shame. We work harder, we run away from failure and the fear and the shame are always a few steps behind us… and so the cycle continues.

So, what is failure? Can you define it? I find that when probed, most of us do not have a clear definition of failure. We allow failure to be an arbitrary, terrifying thing that influences us and yet we do not really know, exactly, what it is. Or, maybe you do have a clear idea. Perhaps failure is a relationship ending, a lost job, a major mistake made at a crucial moment in competition. Perhaps failure is being less than perfect.

Recently, I came across the somewhat radical idea, in an e-book by entrepreneur James Wedmore, that failure does not actually exist.

What if failure is just a label that we use to conceptualize difficult experiences where things have not gone the way we wanted them to? This idea tilted my world slightly as I have spent many years myself running to avoid failure. However, this idea also deeply resonated with me because it is connected to what science and experience tells us about mindset, and I believe mindset to be an incredibly important and central idea to personal development and performance enhancement.

If we embrace one of the core ideas of a growth mindset belief system: that within every perceived “failure” there is an opportunity to learn something important, then the idea of failure loses its power. It shifts our relationships with failure, and yet the word remains and so then does the possibility of experiencing it. I think there is a great argument for throwing out the word failure altogether. I believe we can say that there is no such thing as failure, only lessons.

So, I am challenging myself to throw the word failure out of my vocabulary.

I believe that if we have to re-label the experiences we so often associate with failure, we will be forced to take a closer look at what is actually happening. A failed relationship becomes a relationship that broke down because of poor communication, for example. A failed job becomes a job I lost because I didn’t learn new skills quickly enough, or because I was unfair to my colleagues. A failed competition becomes a competition where I was unable to execute a necessary skill at the necessary level. From this more detailed labeling comes valuable information about where we need to improve, as people and as athletes, in over to be more successful in the future. In throwing out the word failure and looking at what has really happened, we find the lesson.

This approach may not make the experience of the event itself any easier, but it may allow us to skip the self-destroying shame and doubt and move more quickly into a space where we can focus on the lesson we have to learn.

I challenge you to give it a try as well! Let’s see what is possible.