Let yourself be broken.
Failure is scary. When we have the courage to be receptive to it, we can transform our lives and our businesses.
Failure is ugly.
It makes us feel small, powerless and even ashamed. Often our personal and professional defeats are so painful we’d rather sweep them under the rug. But if we pretend like they never happened and ignore the underlying causes, we set ourselves up for the same mistakes to happen all over again. We also become risk averse, limiting our future opportunity.
So how do we cultivate an ethic that encourages risk, acknowledges imperfections and is willing to get it wrong? It’s not easy. Despite Silicon Valley’s attempts, failure will never be sexy and is even harder to reconcile in our age of perfectionism. Getting fired, dumped or suspended isn’t going to get a lot of love on Instagram. Screwing up has become so taboo that colleges are having to teach classes on how to handle it.
Yet our greatest victories are often only possible because of the failures that preceded them.
When I was 26, I was terrified of failure. Despite my best efforts, failure found me.
A year late on my quarter life crisis, I was at a crossroads and looking to change careers. That’s when I discovered ITP, a two-year masters program at NYU that integrates art, design, technology, and entrepreneurship in one magical, weird, brain-busting place. It’s referred to as “the center for the recently possible” and it was everything I wanted in a post-graduate education.
When I applied, I knew I was exactly the kind of student they were looking for. With relevant work experience in media and advertising, wonderful letters of recommendations from alums of the program and a degree with honors from a top 50 liberal arts college, I was a shoo-in.
Anticipating victory was at hand, I eagerly opened the email I received from NYU’s admissions director.
“Dear Colin,
Thank you for your application. At this time we are unable to offer you…”
Rejected. I had failed and I had no backup plan.
Spiraling into despair, the news of my rejection hit me hard. When I contacted the admissions director, I was simply told that the program “was very competitive and that I could try again next year.”
What she said was both fair and true. I could have come to terms with this news as final and moved on with my life. For many, the path to healing first comes through acceptance. That might have been the sensible thing to do — but not for me. I refused to give in because I couldn’t understand. I had to find out why.
A huge part of me wanted to avoid any kind of examination of my rejection. Despite this instinct, I forced myself to face the truth. I took stock of what was broken, incomplete or insufficient in my application, my effort and my preparation as a whole. During this time of honest appraisal and self reflection, I discovered a glaring weakness —my statement of intent describing why I wanted to be in graduate school in the first place.
I re-read my statement. Much to my shock, the person who wrote it sounded arrogant, cavalier, dispassionate and vague. It was one of the laziest, most embarrassing things I had ever created. All I wanted to do was rewrite it.
Borderline crazed, I followed up with the NYU admissions director one more time to better understand how I had missed the mark. In doing so, I found out about a sister program that ITP was running in Shanghai that was still accepting applications. Same curriculum, same credits, same start date, but a different location. The application for Shanghai only required one additional piece of collateral — a new statement of intent written specifically for the program in the Far East. This was my opportunity. I rewrote my initial letter and gave concrete examples of how ITP Shanghai was going to directly further my abilities as a designer, an entrepreneur and a citizen of the world. In stark contrast to my first submission, this letter contained passion, clarity and most important of all intent. I booked a flight to New York to hand deliver it.
When I arrived at NYU, an administrative assistant told me the admissions director for the Shanghai program was sick and couldn’t meet with me. I had just flown 3,000 miles to hand deliver a letter and the recipient was gone. I said that I needed to speak with someone, anyone and that I would wait. Sitting alone, I pondered my predicament. Eventually, someone walked up to me.
“Hi, I’m Dan. I’ve got a few minutes to chat.”
As we walked towards his office, he introduced himself as the chair of the department at ITP. At that moment, my game plan changed.
“So you want to be part of ITP Shanghai?”, he asked as he closed the door to his office. My mind started to race. “Well, yes I do,” I said, “I would go anywhere to be part of this school. But to be honest, my preference is New York. I made a huge mistake with my application and I want the chance to show you why I’d be a great fit for your program.” Over the next twenty minutes, I described in detail what brought me to ITP and how my unique experiences would serve the broader community.
I also got lucky. To my great benefit, he never read my initial application. While making no promises, at the end of our conversation he assured me he would personally review my application with the new statement of intent. I thanked him. That was all I could ask for.
That was on Friday, March 30th, 2012. On Monday, April 2nd, I found out I had moved onto the wait list. Two weeks later, I found out I had been accepted to the graduate program of my dreams — in New York. Several months after being accepted I discovered that ITP’s Shanghai program was being postponed indefinitely. Today it only serves undergraduates.
What I learned from this experience is the likelihood of success is tied to our willingness to openly accept failure as an opportunity, the vulnerability to honestly assess the root cause of our shortcomings and the guts to change our approach. Failure is empowering because it allows us to be tactical. It forces us to take a moment, step back, and reevaluate. It provides the space necessary to discover what didn’t work and the opportunity to devise a plan to venture towards a different result.
Having the audacity to critically examine our past failures is an essential skill in life — and it’s even more important in business.
Earlier this year, I joined IBM’s Watson Education team as Design Lead on Teacher Advisor — a lesson planning tool for teachers built on Watson Artificial Intelligence. When I arrived, our team was at a critical juncture. At the time, our tool was little more than a proof of concept. We had investments in technology that were strategic but not delivering the value we expected. Thus, our traction was weak and our product was struggling to make an impact.
The biggest mistake our team made was delaying our acceptance of what was broken. It required humility. Once we acknowledged our missteps and were willing to learn from them, we were poised to take action. We used IBM Design Thinking to understand the limitations of our product, reflect on what was contributing to our product’s deficiencies and let that learning launch us into new, better and innovative ways of meeting our teachers’ needs.
At the end of the day we are all lifelong learners and will all experience defeat. Making minor adjustments to our failures is equivalent to living in denial. We have to be daring enough to envelop ourselves in the totality of our mistakes in order to fully understand them. Then we can take action.
It takes courage, but if we are bold enough to learn from our failures, and by doing so let them challenge and change us, we create the conditions for transformation, innovation and long-term success.
Colin Narver is a Design Lead on Watson Education in Austin. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
