Learning to Fail
by Design Partner, Jacquie Moss
I am a perfectionist. Throughout my life, I’ve heard that I can do anything well if I work hard enough. The strongest of those voices has been my own. Mistakes are excruciatingly painful for me, from the tiniest social blunder to epic fails of misjudgment. My pain turns into extreme internal shaming and spirals down, historically, into a profound depression. Worst of all, I am hard on others. I’ve held others to the same high, even if unachievable, standards. As the owner of a design agency in San Francisco, these qualities had some value. As a friend, wife, mother, and global citizen, I let the intense drive for some notion of perfection supersede joy, compassion, kinship, and humility.
Striving for perfection, when positively channeled, seems a very human desire to apply our skills and talents with keen focus and rigour, to feel proud of our accomplishments, and to consistently improve. The more time one spends honing a craft, one hopes to achieve mastery. In our culture of constant innovation, mastery is often fleeting. Furthermore, when you start to reckon with humanity’s gnarly problems related to climate change and social justice, perfection can become the enemy of progress.
At the age of 43, I went back to school. My explicit reason was the quest for subject matter expertise in issues related to climate change. The experience, upon reflection, was a much-needed lesson in resilience and humility. How can you be perfect at something that is entirely new and so massive in scope? Oh, I tried, and I was seriously making myself crazy. A crazy mom is not what I want for my girls. So with the help of a persistent therapist and supportive husband, I had to reckon with my perfection demons and trust the journey of learning.
My mom said to me once, “I haven’t failed much in my life.” At first, I thought she was caught up in her own perfection complex, but she continued, “because I haven’t taken risks.” Her admission was powerful in helping me to re-frame my failures. I’ve rarely been one to avoid new experiences or plunge head first into a design challenge. But there was an important step missing — an honest assessment of where I might encounter my limits and permission (from myself and others) to make mistakes and learn from them.
At my design agency, I was often involved in performance review conversations, particularly when the manager had to provide feedback that might be hard to give. I felt a kind of envy when people had an opportunity to hear where they were encountering their limits and being offered advice on how to bring more attention to a “problem area” or adjust the job criteria or role. As hard as these conversations can be (and it’s always worth fine-tuning the process), they are a gift when given with a spirit of appreciation, opportunity, and humility.
For those of us who naturally set a high bar, it might be worth encountering some new challenges — to be reminded of what it feels like to be in the awkward, yet exciting times of learning and encountering our limits. We might also try living vicariously through people around us who are learning, perhaps a child or new employee. Feel the fear, the uncertainty, and the desire to succeed. Allow yourself and others to fail (safely), and be there to show that they are still worthwhile, how cool it is that they learned X or Y, and how brave they are to keep trying!
In both of my young daughters, I see this drive for perfection. As it often goes, they are the best teachers. How do I want them to respond to their mistakes? How do I want them to feel about themselves after a set-back? I certainly want to nurture their desire to work hard on something, to care deeply about their work product, and to take pride in doing something well. Likewise, I want them to experience disappointment and remorse, to humbly accept their limits, and to keep practicing. If they can build resilience within themselves, they will be so much better equipped to return this kindness to others. I’m learning (with lots of mistakes along the way) to demonstrate this for them.
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