
The “F” Word
Failure. I’m talking about failure.
What does it mean to fail and how do you handle a failure? Do you become frustrated, throw the nearest object, or immediately blame a team member for your own shortcomings?
As a professional, I’ve seen many adults as well as teens take failure in all manner of ways. Some behaviors are more acceptable in our culture than others, and some behaviors are just generally preferred, whether culture permits it or not.
There are many ways to look at failure, and here is how I feel:
— Failure is a chance to learn.
The problem is that failure is not always viewed as something this progressive in the workplace. A failure is akin to a step backwards, that something is missing within the person, that some synapse will never fire and that the person cannot grow. It is truly a shame.
Radical thinkers, artists, engineers…heck, everyone who wants to learn a skill must fail. You failed when you were learning how to walk, when you were learning how to read and mispronounced a word, or when you were learning to ride a bike or dribble a ball.
Any skill earned requires a cycle of failure and growth that leads to an eventual form of mastery.
The problem I see is that there is a lack of a growth mindset. Many expect to be the best the first time, to reach proficiency with no fight, memory work, or practice; the expectation is instant mastery. By having this expectation, people become easily frustrated when learning a new skill and simply call it a case of “old dogs can’t learn new tricks.” In the case of my teen art students I often heard “I am not good at art and I never will be” or “my (sibling) got all of the art genes so I will never be good.” It saddens me that by high school, students have already taught themselves fake boundaries and limits on their skills and ability to learn them. These fake boundaries that my teens have built around themselves will travel with them like iron shackles into adulthood, weighing them down with thoughts of “I cannot do this, it is too hard” or “only (smarter, stronger, more extraverted people, etc…) can do this, so I cannot. There is no point in trying.”
Once you have trained yourself to see limits instead of opportunities to grow, limits of the self begin sprouting up everywhere. You start to cave in on yourself. You blind yourself to new paths.
Today or tomorrow…or even the next day, whenever the next time is that you make a mistake…I would like you to step back and review what you have accomplished. I would like for you to take your failure as a moment of learning instead of a step backwards, or as some “sign” that you need to give up.
What path are you on? Where do you want to get to?
Are there paths previously unvisited because you were blind to the opportunity? Or did the challenge presented by change frighten you?
Take a moment today to think on it.
