The Antidote:7: The museum of failure: The case for embracing your errors.

Today I finished chapter 7 of “The Antidote” by Oliver Burkeman. It started with a charming story about the Gfk Custom Research storehouse of failed products. 90% of products fail so the isles are filled with funny and unbelievable products people tried to launch. Executives pay money to visit to inspire their teams and sometimes they come across a product that they didn’t know their own company tried to launch.

Here are my notes:

• Positive thinking avoids the concept of failure. All previous techniques point towards an alternative approach to happiness.
• Benefits of embracing failure- Without it it leaves a sever distorted understanding of what it takes to be successful. An openness is a much richer kind of happiness. 1% of species are successful on earth. All else fails
• Why are we afraid of failure? — We edit out our failures. Our brain filters out irrelevant or unwanted incoming info. We do the same when triggered with info that violates our expectations.
• Problems with reluctance to think or analyze failure- Distorted view of the causes of success
• Successful and unsuccessful people possess perseverance and leadership, influence on others.
• Survivor bias results in undersampling of failure
• Taking a risk is over valued
• Epic failure story: The Millennium Dome.
• Technique: Embrace failure as failure not as a pathway to success. Welcoming it feels better than avoiding it.
• Failure sometimes feels like an attack on who we are. We become attached to success
• Perfectionism is often a fear driven striving to avoid failure at all costs
• Downfall (Natalie Goldberg) is to see and feel things as they are..we have to crash to see them.
• Zen — Great failure..a boundless surrender..nothing to hold on to.
• Fixed to incremental mindset/viewpoint on our individual talent
• Technique: When failure strikes, consider it as happening because you are stretching your limits and in the long run you are improving them.
• Failure is seen as death, when it is the route to a far more vivid, raw, acutely experienced way of being alive.
• J.K Rowling — …failure stripped away the inessential…I was free because my biggest fear had been realized and I was still alive.