Every day, a new story of success is hammered into my news feed.

Someone got a multi-million dollar investment in their business after remortgaging their house and living on instant noodles for six months. Another failed 100 times before they succeeded and said every failure led them to success. Then there was the student with the amazing business idea who left university to pursue their dream.

It’s inspirational. God, it’s inspirational.

The Zuckerbergs and Spiegels give us something to aspire to. Something to dream to. These stories resonate with us because it makes us think that if they can do it, we can do it too.

But last month, I read a different story.

Nikki Durkin’s high-profile start-up, 99 Dresses, failed and she talked about it publicly — right here on Medium, in fact. It was the most honest, realistic, and useful depiction of what business truly is, and it made me realise something.

We need more stories about failure — not failure that results in success.

We need to talk about real, honest, brutal, raw, life-altering, soul-crushing failure.

Failure as a necessity to success?

Evidently, we are living in the age of the entrepreneur. We are living in the age of the business owner, the age of the start-up, and the age of self-employment. More people are reading stories and hearing about people who have “gone for it”, started their own businesses and are doing incredibly well.

These stories are inspiring to the rest of us and the more people that read these, the more people leave their day job to chase their dream, inspired by the regular ol’ guy down the road who made his own online store or app.

In the age of the entrepreneur, the message is constantly out there that we need to be failing in order to succeed. We have all heard Sara Blakely talk about how her father encouraged her to fail, and how she credits it to her success. Failure is seen as a necessary step on the pathway to success and we all need to experience it in order to reach success. We need to start businesses, go for our dreams, and we need to embrace failure. We need to be ready to fall.

But all these stories end the same way.

People fail, but in blogs or in magazines there’s always a big success story at the end. It’s the same as the classic narrative in chick flicks where girl meets guy, girl goes through a million problems and heartaches but ultimately she ends up living happily ever after. There’s always some positive spin or a smiling face at the end of it all.

Nobody ever writes about how they failed, and that was it. Period. Nothing else. No success story. Just failure.

Is this the Matrix?

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?

[Takes a bite of steak]

Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.

I believe that, at this moment, we are living in some kind of entrepreneurial Matrix — where everything that we understand and perceive as reality doesn’t really exist as reality. The media constructs the world around us: a world of hope and of endless possibility where entrepreneurial success is almost a given after some minor bouts with “failure”. But this isn’t necessarily a clear representation of reality.

8 out of ten businesses fail. 80% of people fail. They really fail. They lose mortgages. They lose themselves. Failure isn’t hard. No one talks about how horribly painful it can be. No one talks about moving back in with their parents and not knowing when the next paycheck will come, and honestly not knowing what they will do with their lives.

We aren’t told that this is what could happen — and very likely will happen — at least a few times on this journey to a destination called “entrepreneurial success” (if we get there at all). But that’s the reality of the world we live in, and those who go into business or entrepreneurship expecting success as a given — expecting that “failure” is just a stepping stone to success and that’s just how the process works — may be in for a rude awakening.

If we talk about failing without success attached to it, we can bring ourselves back into the real world. No matter how painful or difficult, at least it’s real and from there, we can start to really talk about how to deal with this failure and move on — and perhaps even turn it into something beneficial.

Failure as hope

Failure — pure failure — isn’t sexy. It isn’t aspirational. It doesn’t make you want to quit your day job. Real failure can be confronting. But at least it’s a real representation of the way the world is.

However difficult and disinteresting it can be, we need to talk about it and understand it. We need to talk about how difficult failure is. How to cope with it. How to understand it, and how to move on from it. How to pick everything up and begin again — not necessarily with a clear vision and direction, but just how to take that first step to believing in ourselves and the world around us again.

Talking about failure without notions of intrinsic success attached to it isn’t a negative thing. Talking about failure helps us see things for what they really are. And ultimately, it’s with this true perception of reality that we can then look at the world, see it for what it is and know that we have every possibility of failing hard and losing it all…and decide to take the leap anyway.