Failure
One Saturday at 8:07am, every person living in paradise received an alert on their phone:
Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. This is not a drill.
A massive mistake due to human error, creating panic and fear, for which someone got fired. In a word: #fail
We all make mistakes every day. Unlike a false alarm for pending nuclear annihilation, the little things we fuck up probably go unnoticed by us and the people we work with. Those errors don’t make us a failure.
The problem is we come to believe we are defined more by our single mistakes than our many achievements. Our failings can haunt us and stop us from moving forward. I vividly remember striking out at my first time up to the plate when our junior high team made it to softball playoffs. We lost every inning. To this day I believe that I if I pick up a bat I will be bad at baseball. Three strikes and I’ve been out of the game forever.
And yet I need to be reminded of the many times people have thanked me for the songs I’ve played, the words I’ve written, or the ways I’ve helped them. Why should childhood baseball have so much power over my life? Like the inner imposter that tells us we aren’t good enough, our lifetime report card seems only to be covered in giant red Fs.
We are also told we shouldn’t be afraid to fail. Fail fast, fail often - the famous Silicon Valley motto. We should fail better, according to Samuel Beckett (what does that even mean?), while Brené Brown channels Teddy Roosevelt encouraging us all to get in the ring and dare greatly.
Maybe we could be a bit kinder to ourselves. Do we have to try (and screw up) at everything in order to grow? I have no desire to ever attempt bungee jumping. I also refuse to be bullied into doing it, and will never believe that the thrill of jumping from a great height with a rubber band tied to my ankles will add value to my existence.
Perhaps there are things that we are not meant to do, or be. I have no desire to have children of my own, and it’s not because I’m afraid of failing at being a parent. In the vision of a life well lived for myself fatherhood has never featured. I know most of the world deems this as failure. I’ve seen the pity in people’s eyes when we childless folk say we have no kids. I’ve braced myself time and time again against the patronising “you don’t understand — you don’t have children” comment. I’ve sat through friends’ self-rationalisation that parenting is hard, but oh-so-life affirming. And prepared myself for the sinking feeling that rises up every so often, when the loud voice of society calls out from inside, shaming me for the choice I’ve made.
Parenthood is a place rife with failure. For every father telling me that having children is the best thing he’s ever done (as if it were an experience to tick off the bucket list) there is one I meet where all I see is stress, fear and an unhappiness that they can’t speak of. Parenting has become the ultimate competition — there is a right way to raise a child, the right schools to send them to, the right way to discipline. Suddenly parenting is about winning. Which means somehow amongst your peers, one of you must be failing.
Our need to please our own parents — or our bosses and partners — can also easily make us feel like failures. As someone who likes people to be happy, I’ve realised that words can have huge power over me. I’m grateful to a French client early in my career who throughout a project told me how disappointed she was in our work. Clearly I was a disappointment to her. So I would work twice as hard to make sure she was happy, even though doing so meant long hours trying to guess what she wanted. Once I understood that the French were educated to find faults in things, and that expressing disappointment was part of their way of criticising, I could let go of the disappointment in myself. Soon I understood that my role in helping people did not extend to pleasing them — and that I didn’t need to be liked by everyone. How liberating for me, and how much more effective my work has become.
Failure in business is based on comparison. Turnover, profit, size, square footage of office space. The high school game of “mines bigger than yours” that never stops being played. VCs expect 9 out of every 10 of their investments to fail. They want to see rapid scale to unicorn stature or they will allow free fall failure. If only we understood the cost of this accepted way of doing business — not only in wasted capital, but in emotional damage to those who surrender their dreams to someone else’s expectation.
It’s taken me time to be able to recognise my own success. I know now it isn’t about how much I have of something. My time in the music industry would be deemed a failure if it was only measured in millions of pounds — but what should it be measured on? When I talk about what I have achieved, I sometimes hear myself mitigating my own success. I feel my eyes look down and away, protecting myself from the piercing doubt of the jury in front of me. Wondering why I hadn’t just been born a lawyer or doctor, so I could forever avoid justifying myself to strangers.
Recognising success has helped me see where in the past I have failed myself.
Now I know success is in creating something valuable that changes people’s lives. It doesn’t really matter how many team members our business has, how many clients we serve, or how much more profit we make than someone else. For me it matters that we create something that we care about, and that what we do is purposeful and helps people grow.
So failure can’t be about size, or losing out to someone else. It can’t just be about not trying, because we don’t need to try everything. It lives somewhere in the middle.
I think failure is being unable to look at our life with acceptance. Failure is refusing to see that at any point we are doing the best we can. And most of all, we don’t fail others. We only fail ourselves, especially when we can’t give ourselves permission to have what we truly want.
When I see failure this way, I can grow with it. The learnings from mistakes are more meaningful, because I can actually see with a balanced perspective what has worked and what hasn’t. And I can take a long term view of success rather than being my own worst critic for the little fuck ups.
I was invited to help a group gathered at the United Nations see how creativity could stop biodiversity loss. UN presentations tend to start with a graph that gives irrefutable evidence of how we are living in Armageddon (mine started with a picture of Luke Skywalker). The scientists in the room seem turned on by disaster and being able to tell you we are failing. If we don’t act right now, we will have failed the next generation.
Ballistic threat — this is not a drill.
Perhaps it’s because I don’t have children, but I think we are doing the best we can now. Along the way we have made some mistakes, and if we are truly committed now to making change happen, we have incredible power to create it. Of course there are things we can do differently — acceptance of where we are isn’t about complacency.
The collective narrative of failure is failing us. I choose to look forward and see success ahead. And maybe one day, I’ll even go up to bat again.
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