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Je
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nifer^
YoungIdealog.co.nz | The Transformation Issue
061
opinion
061Humans are facing the fastest rate of change and some of the biggest challenges our species has ever
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hile failure has long been looked at
through a negative lens, I believe
it's time to look at it from a different
perspective – and to unlearn what we’ve
learned from our culture about failure.But first, where does fear of failure
come from?
When we think about failure and resilience, we can learn
a lot from our younger humans. Firstly, they have an
innate drive to learn and grow. In learning to walk, there
is unlimited support for their abilities. They try, they fall
down, they get up and repeat. The lesson here: none of us
would be able to walk, dance or play if we fell down six
times and didn’t get up the seventh time.
In writing this article, I interviewed 20 people across
various industries and businesses. Common themes
came out through stories about incidences occurring at
formative ages (normally eight to 14 years old) when they
were ridiculed in front of other kids for making a mistake
which they internalised as them being ‘bad’ at something.
Brené Brown defines these instances as ‘creativity scars’
when these early failures become moments of shame for us.
Too many entrepreneurs think that if their first
business idea is a failure, they aren’t cut out for it. The
same goes for artists: if their early work doesn’t get praised,
too many believe they don’t have the skill required. A
little closer to home for many is if the first two or three
relationships are bad, many believe they will never find
love. Thankfully, life and evolution does not work this way.
Life is about adapting, evolving, revising, and iterating. We
are not expected to figure it all out on the first try.
Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling
or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore
unworthy of love, belonging, and connection”. From a
neuroscientific perspective, we’re more likely to remember
the bad or painful incidents than the good or rewarding
situations. Our brains are not hardwired to make us happy,
they’re hardwired to keep us safe. Neuroscience tells us
that the pain and feelings of rejection that shame inflicts
How failure
isn't necessarily
a bad thing
are as real as physical pain. Sorry
Mum, neuroscience says you’re wrong:
sticks and stones may break my
bones, but names can also hurt me.
It’s during these moments when
our brains are not fully developed
that it helps to have someone
experienced help to reframe the
failure for us. Then we can internalise
the experience as pain or guilt
instead of shame. Guilt says, ‘I’ve
done something bad’. Shame says ‘I
am bad’ or ‘I am not enough’. This
can help us see that the incident is us
learning, and not a character flaw.Is failure actually
a good thing?
The simple answer is yes AND no.
It all depends how you perceive
and respond to failure. Failure is a
mental construct, while others see
the obstacle as the way (thanks,
Ryan Holiday and stoicism). Born
out of our schooling and societal
norms, failure is seen as a bad
thing. The question is: are we
perceiving failure as a bad thing,
or as a learning experience? Until
we question this for ourselves we
will not be able to transcend the
limitations of failure and see that
we can overcome many perceived
challenges through better thinking.
We can take a leaf out of
scientists’ and entrepreneurs’ books
here. Without failures, we wouldn’t
have great innovations that change
the world forever. When Bill Gates
was demonstrating his first product, adevice for reading and processing traffic data, he couldn’t
even get the machine to work. Their company Traf-O-Data
did fail, but it provided the foundation for the success of
Microsoft’s first product years later. Even Albert Einstein
himself said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay
with the problems longer.”
Co-founder of CodeCamp Peter Duncan teaches
kids to code. He explained that many kids came in “with
walls built up and were too scared to test... so we teach
them that F.A.I.L. means First Attempt At Learning. At
CodeCamp we encourage kids to fail fast and often”.
In essence, he and his team encourage kids to reframe
failures as learning. For adults coaches, psychologists
and managers are excellent for this external feedback.
Reframing failure helps us become more resilient.
For scientists, a negative result is not an indication
that they are a bad scientist. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Proving a hypothesis wrong is often just as useful as
proving it right because they learned something along the
way. Scientists treat failure as another data point. How
might it impact our quality of life if we treated failures as
data points that can help lead us to the right answers?What defining features differentiate those
that give up and those that are resilient?
A key theme among interviewees was that the resilient
people they knew had high levels of self-awareness, managed
high-stress situations well and they prioritised investing in
their wellbeing. This ensured they were consistently able to
show up and face upcoming challenges. Uncomfortable is
Ok podcast host Chris Desmond has interviewed over 230
resilient founders, athletes and creatives. What did they have
in common? For many, their normal response to failure was
reframing it as learning, they had a sense of ‘why’ or purpose
that kept them going and they were curious to see how
things could be done differently and better. In essence, the
resilient people innovated, iterated and were agile in their
ways of thinking and working.
Thankfully, resilience is a learned ability. We can learn
how to bounce from adversity, grow, connect and flow. »