The art of failing
“Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat, to learn to die is to be liberated from it. So when tomorrow comes, you must free your ambitious mind, and learn the art of dying.”
~ Bruce Lee
Ever since time immemorial, I have heard people I admire give very particular advice; embrace and accept failure. I have to admit that at first, I can’t say I knew what that meant. Well, I thought it implied not feeling sad when things don’t work out, or braving things out even when things are tough. But what did it mean exactly? How would I embrace failure? And why is it important to do so
I have been going through a gradual journey to learn and understand how it applies to both my personal and work life. Here are a few lessons I got on this journey.
The dangerous narrative
Being a failure was a major taboo growing up, there was no room for it. A person’s value was directly correlated with their success, and failure was seen as the end of their journey.
Stories would then be told to kids to serve as a lesson on the importance of always being the best, and just like that, the cycle of socializing kids to feel this way too would thrive.
Having such a background, I naturally always ran away from failure. This meant two things: I would immediately give up on a task or skill that I failed at, and I wouldn’t take any risks that seemed to lead to failure; being bad at drawing or at volleyball meant that it wasn’t for me, and I would immediately give that thing up. Hence, when I first heard someone say that we should embrace failure, I was shocked. Why would I want to fail? What if my story ends there? What if society hates me? I stagnated because of fear, and thus you can see the danger of such a narrative.
Failure, our teacher
Changing your mindset especially after years of cementing an ideology inside you is a difficult task. It involves being intentional with restructuring habits, thought processes and even social interactions. In order to make this change, I had to learn some practical things I would do to accept failure in order to be liberated from it. To realize that failure is something we should view differently; to see it as a chance to learn. This allowed me to be free to try many new things, and to do them creatively, because there was no fear of being wrong.
How to fail
Here are some situations and ways I have learnt that one can do to embrace failure:
- Just keep swimming ~ Dora
I’ve always been fascinated by art, particularly visual art; all the way from renaissance art to impressionist art. It has the power to engross me for hours and stir powerful emotions within me. One of my favourite artists of all time is Vincent Van Gogh and this is because he serves as an inspiration to me.
Vincent was a post-impressionist artist whose style wasn’t popular at the time. Critics often said his aesthetic was ‘reckless and ugly’ , mostly because they often compared him to the more popular realism artists. Furthermore, rumor has it that he sold only one of his paintings in his lifetime. Despite this, Vincent kept on painting. He painted over 900 paintings in his lifetime . Today, he is one of the most celebrated artists of all time, with his paintings going for hundreds of millions of dollars. More importantly, he ended up inspiring people like me. I guess that’s where his ambition got him; inspiring a young lady in Kenya centuries later.
The spirit of keeping on has also played out in my career. Startups, especially at the beginning, involve putting in a lot of effort and crazy hours to run an experiment that could go either way. Working on a product in a continent whose startup failure rate is high is even more scary, because the risk factor almost doubles. One may feel like giving up. One thing about it is this though; as long as the mission and the why is clear and solid within the team, these long days seem worth it, and you have the urge to keep on. Another motivating factor here is that most of the most successful companies started that way. Only those with the grit and tenacity to carry on make it. Once the results start coming in and your work impacts someone’s life, all the struggles faced are justified.
2. Play the fool
I once watched a profound TED talk where the speaker spoke about how he took on an interesting experiment. He decided to expose himself to all kinds of embarrassing situations in order to build a resistance towards embarrassment. He did it purposefully over time, and interestingly enough, the fear of being ridiculed stopped crossing his mind. He became more bold in doing things he liked. Despite his drastic methods, the speaker achieved something major.
Being afraid of ‘being the fool’ or being the weird one in a group is a fear many of us have. Since I was young, I was always afraid of doing anything outside the rules that would make me stand out significantly. I was the classic rule follower, who never dared to be different, mainly because of the fear of ridicule. However, this fear didn’t do me any good, because it denied me the chance to do things that were uniquely me, that made me stand out from the crowd.
In a very developed world where it’s easy to disappear in the masses, unique and different people who bring fresh perspectives are the ones who stand out. From the kind of companies we build to the kind of culture we choose to embody, accepting to be ridiculed and be misunderstood at the beginning allows you to take on anything, because the world’s opinion of you is just that, an opinion. Embracing failure allows you to accept being the fool, but allows you to be you, which is freeing.
3. Be child-like.
I was seated with my nieces one afternoon, and one of them came with her tiny notebook, and showed me a drawing she had done of her dad. Being a self proclaimed art critic, I started analyzing the anatomy, trying to see how good it was. My little niece seemed to care very little about my opinion though, because she was bubbling with excitement, showing everyone in the room that particular picture, with literally no worries about whether they liked it or not. I thought about that for a moment, and I was struck with a major lesson. She didn’t do the drawing to prove that she’s the greatest artist of all time, she just did it because she likes drawing and she loves her dad, so she drew him. Plain and simple.
I started learning the importance of embodying the mentality that kids have; not doing things to prove anything to anyone, or to be the best, but just doing them because you enjoy them or you believe in them, without the fear of the critic that is the world. This allows them to take on anything, and I believe it should allow us to do the same.
4. Being patient with yourself
Part of embracing failure is knowing and understanding that you are new to most things, and you are learning as you go. You’ve never lived this life before, so you really are figuring it out as you go. You are definitely bound to make mistakes. This area was particularly hard for me, especially because I have a side of me that always wants to win and succeed. Failing or being bad at something often took a huge toll on me and would often send me to rock bottom. It invalidated my whole ideology which was, I couldn’t do any grand in the world if I didn’t keep winning. I am however slowly learning that that’s not true.
Through the Innovation Fellowship at Impact Africa Network, I got the opportunity to build an exciting product, the SE Platform, a tool that provides entrepreneurs with a step by step process for how to start, execute and launch their ideas. Seeing our baby go out into the world has helped me unlearn lots of the ideologies about failure.
There were very many unknowns at the start, especially about the market, and my team and I had to try a lot of different things before we got results. Helping entrepreneurs get their products to traction was our very ambitious goal and getting there was not as easy as we anticipated. Failed experiments, lack of knowledge in some areas, being wrong often; all these made me doubt myself and my capabilities. During this time of doubt, we were fortunate enough to have access to a great pool of mentors by our side who accelerated our journey and pushed us to trust the process. Specifically, our founder & CEO, Mark Karake who stepped in to actively help us visualize the dream, strategize, and understand industry insights that helped us cross the great huddles that existed. More importantly, Mark reemphasized to us that we, young Kenyan people, were capable of changing the world through our product, if only we dared to.
Our technical mentor Brian Busolo , a program manager at Microsoft, helped our more limited developer minds to expand into visualizing the amazing things we could build if we just put in the work and trusted in ourselves. He helped shape our platform to what it is now through his amazing mentorship.
Through all this support, I could see and feel myself growing, in terms of skill and knowledge, all because of those risks we were encouraged to take. I realized that I learnt way less when I succeeded at something as compared to when I failed. All the times I have failed at something I was doing, I learnt what I needed to improve on or heal, and once I was brave enough to take on it, I emerged stronger and more knowledgeable than ever. I have grown a part of me that I wouldn’t have if I succeeded
The beauty of it all is that our product has helped push the founders in our community to get started into actualizing their ideas, some already launching because of our product, and that to me, was the beauty of trusting the process; seeing your vision come to life.
Be patient with yourself, allow yourself to try new things, fail, learn, unlearn, fail again; all that will help you grow.
Embracing failure shifts our mindset, because it allows us to be creative, to try everything we want to. Failure is no longer a barrier; it is welcome because we will learn from it. From this, we finally get to be ourselves, unapologetically.
I made some last promises to myself, to conclude my short learning journey. To keep trying, to play the fool, to be child-like and to be patient with myself. Once I did all these, I would truly be free.
