Are you juicing your failures?
Why you might be missing out on the best part of this common human experience
We’ve all heard that mistakes are a great opportunity to learn. It’s probably even sewn on a pillow that you can buy on Etsy. We’ve become accustomed to hearing start-ups proclaim they “fail fast!”. Shakira sings “Nobody learns without gettin' it wrong” (if that doesn’t ring a bell, it’s time you rewatched Zootopia).
And yet, why do most of us feel so bad when we actually experience a failure? Why do we keep solving the same problem over and over again?
Worse yet, maybe we don’t even let ourselves accept that we HAVE failed – our brain plays little tricks on us to convince ourselves that’s how we thought it would go down in the first place, so everything is fine. Discomfort, erased!
What these catchy slogans don’t mention is that learning isn’t an automatic result of failure. We have to actually do some work to get something out of it.
There are a few points at which you might be veering off the path of learning from failures:
#1: You don’t clearly specify what would constitute success in the first place. If you don’t define up front how you want a given experience to go, you can’t get too upset when it doesn’t work out, because maybe that’s just how it was supposed to be. Say, for example, you have an upcoming job interview. You research the company, consider why you’re a fit for the role, and practice answering questions. When the interview comes, and you get through it, but you don’t feel great about it. You briefly agonize over whether you “aced” it or not. You never hear back from the company, and eventually shrug “well, I guess that didn’t work out”. Meanwhile, you’ve moved on to the next job application.
#2: You don’t assess the gap between what you thought would happen, and what actually happened. OK, let’s say you HAD envisioned what success in that interview would look like – confidently answering each question, making sure you shared stories about 3 specific accomplishments, and minimizing your “ums”. As the interview unfolds, you can’t pull it off – reality looks very different than your picture of success. As you exit the Zoom call, you say “I bombed it”. But, you’re so ashamed that you just want to forget about it, so you run to the nearest donut shop to blot out your memory with glazed chocolate. It’s too embarrassing to objectively reflect on what just happened. Rehashing it would be so cringe-y!
#3: You don’t determine what went wrong, to understand what contributed to the failure. What is learning, after all? One definition might be a better understanding of the world, based on an actual experience or observation. Each time we try something, we either gather one more proof point of everything working just as we thought, or we detect small variations from our assumptions. If we can objectively identify these differences, we can dig in and investigate what’s really going on. Why did it work out this way, instead of that way? This might give us a new hypothesis that’s a little more accurate than our prior one.
Going back to our interview example, let’s say you didn’t succumb to #1 and #2 above - maybe you noted a few specific gaps, like “gave answers that were too short for the interviewer to understand my skills”, or “forgot to mention why I took a year off from working”. OK, great, now you have some non-judgmental statements about what really happened – why do you think that might be? What was going on there for you? Was it something about the way you prepared, or your mental state during the interview?
#4: You don’t use your learnings to make an intentional change for next time. This is why “learning” gets a bad rap from old school business stereotypes who just want “results!” Learning in and of itself can feel really good, and it’s definitely a worthy pursuit in life to just know more stuff. However, when it comes to getting better at something that’s important to you – whether that’s work, or a sport, or playing music – it’s how we use those learnings to adjust our actions next time that actually results in the payoff.
Let’s say you were able to determine a specific reason you flunked your interview – you hadn’t expected the first two questions the interviewer asked, which threw you off your game, made you nervous, and caused you to rush through later answers. What would you do with that learning, to give yourself the best chance of making your next interview more successful?
Now, even if you know all of these pitfalls, and are committed to using failure to learn, it can still be hard to do it by yourself. For one thing, it takes time (although less than you think). Depending on your outlook, it might feel unpleasant. We just aren’t that great at observing ourselves objectively with grace, as opposed to beating ourselves up.
In my last post, I talked about the general benefits of having a coach. When it comes to navigating failure, a coach can be particularly useful. They can help you:
Clearly envision how you want something to work
Examine an experience, and notice how it differed from what you expected
Take stock of what you now know about how things really are – the world, a process, yourself, etc.
Adjust how you approach a similar situation next time, and encourage you to follow through
Repeat this cycle to accumulate and apply every single learning
Mistakes are essential to getting better at anything. The way we translate them into improvement is to reflect with curiosity, rather than judgment. Next time you “fail”, ask yourself a few simple questions:
What happened differently than I expected?
Why might that have happened?
What’s really going on here?
What does that tell me about how this thing really works?
OK, let’s “keep on making those new mistakes!” (Shakira again).
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