Failure: The Part We Don’t Talk About
This concept of failing, and perhaps failing greatly, is something I keep hearing about.
It goes something like this…
Fail or make a mistake. Learn from it. Rinse and repeat until you’ve grown into something successful. Whatever that might mean for you.
Entrepreneurs, CEOs, sports professionals, celebrities. They’ve all mentioned that there were failures and mistakes along the route. And because of those failed attempts, they learned things that helped them grow.
It’s a valuable part of the story, I’m not discounting that. I believe that there are going to be failures and mistakes along the way. I also completely buy into the idea that there are hard and fast lessons you learn when you do fail. Failure is necessary.
What bugs me is that this concept of failing has become almost fashionable.
Yes, I made a lot of mistakes on the way. The path to success isn’t linear. I tried a lot of things that failed before I became wildly successful doing this.
We’ve heard it a hundred times. And yet, it’s not quite that simple, is it?
I find myself leaving conversations or talks like that thinking something like… Ok, great. Failure is good. Now what?
I understand the concept of failure, of course, but these stories aren’t about not trying. They’re not about giving up or knowingly doing something that isn’t going to work.
Alex Honnold said, “That’s the problem with trying your hardest — sometimes you fail”.
It’s this kind of failure, the “I-tried-my-hardest-and-it-still-didn’t-work” failure that really matters.
Here’s the disconnect: we don’t want to fail.
I don’t know about you but mistakes are not something I strive for. In fact, I try to avoid them.
Yet, I keep being told that they’re the key.
Something is missing in the conversations. It’s the part no one seems to talk about. The real beginning of the story and quite possibly, the thing that keeps it all progressing.
Vulnerability.
(Also, somehow genuine hard work seems to have gotten lost in this beautification of failure, but that’s still a thing too.)
It’s the part where you choose to be vulnerable and veer off the beaten path. Because if you chose to do things the way they’ve always been done… well, you know the rest.
The official definition of vulnerable is “capable of being physically or emotionally wounded; open to attack or damage”.
Hard no.
That’s my immediate reaction to that. Surely, you can understand why choosing to be vulnerable is hard and harder still to talk about but in my mind, it’s the most important thing.
Brené Brown has an awesome talk on Netflix right now, The Call To Courage. In it, she says,
“No vulnerability, no creativity. No tolerance for failure, no innovation.”
Preach.
We need to be vulnerable in order to try new things. And, we have to accept the possibility of being wounded or damaged if they don’t work out.
It’s only when we do those things that we open ourselves up to this concept of meaningful failure.
So the takeaway (at least according to me) in all this beautified talk about failure is that you have to be willing to be vulnerable if you’re going to have the chance to be great. It might not be fun (at first) and it may be hard to talk about but it’s necessary.
For me, vulnerability looks something like this blog post. Openly sharing things I think about as I walk to work and move through life.
I’m an email marketer by trade. And while I would consider that to be a passion of mine, there’s something else too.
Someone recently asked me what my career goals were and it took me a little to find an answer. There isn’t a specific title I’ve always dreamed of having or a specific thing that I can point to and call it a success.
I haven’t been able to put my finger on exactly what my definition of success is, but I’ll get there.
