A critical element of commitment is the willingness and ability to continue pushing ahead through failure—or at least perceived failure. Failing productively has become a hackneyed idea in business and social media, and failure is often touted with an air of wisdom by celebrities of dubious achievement as an unmatched tool for personal growth. John C. Maxwell wrote, “Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.” This kind of thinking has captivated people for some reason (while often admittedly misunderstood or misapplied)—arguably because it’s a way for them to instantly and effortlessly revise their depressing personal histories and create a sense of accomplishment when none exists.
In glorifying failure, or embracing the idea that failing ultimately produces success, too many have completely missed the point, misinterpreted essential ideas, or applied the concept inappropriately. In order for failure to have any potential to be meaningful and productive, it has to be the result of the right type of efforts and attempts. Any of us can right now think of hundreds of ways to fail by the end of the day without the slightest potential to gain any wisdom other than that we just spent an entire day making stupid decisions and shouldn’t repeat the exercise. I can walk out of my office fifty yards to the edge of a cliff and try to fly down to the river a hundred feet below. I’d be completely confident in two things—first, that I would fail completely, and second, that the experience would provide me absolutely nothing of value.
Failure itself doesn’t magically create wisdom or growth or success—the encompassing process does. That process is what determines whether or not any involved failures are actually valuable, and the process includes not just the actual actions we take, but also the reasons we take them, and the way we evaluate the outcomes. Most importantly, it includes the way we view failure and the actions we take subsequently. It’s a complex system with multiple inputs and influences—not a simple switch.
When suggesting failure ultimately results in success, failure proponents typically make the enormous mistake of focusing on a single experience rather than the encompassing process of which that incident is a small part. That is, one might point to the great success of a given famous individual and share a story of how he or she failed over and over before finally succeeding, implying—or even explicitly claiming—that those failures are somehow the reason for the success.
But it’s misleading to describe that history as a series of failures producing success. In fact, those many failures were all pieces of a single ongoing process—steps along the way from start to finish. A simple analogy would be hiking cross-country through the wilderness to a planned endpoint. We may spend some time hiking in a direction that leads us to an impassible obstruction like a cliff or unfordable river, forcing us to backtrack and determine another course. If we look at this section of the hike in isolation, it could be fairly described as a failure—we failed to go the right way and didn’t reach the endpoint. But if, after some recalculation and rerouting, we reach our chosen endpoint, we’ve succeeded. That means that what we initially viewed as a failure wasn’t actually a failure—it was only a single piece of a process (reaching the endpoint) that was completed successfully.
Thomas Edison, when asked how it felt to fail a thousand times before succeeding in creating a functional light bulb responded, “I didn’t fail a thousand times; the light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps.” In other words, the reporter who asked the question was incorrectly assessing pieces of a single task as distinct tasks themselves, and in consequence, because individually they didn’t result in a functioning bulb, deeming them failures. That reporter’s logic is the same used typically by failure proponents to paint failure as beneficial. That same logic applied to a one-mile run would call every single stride along the way until the final one a failure because it doesn’t reach the length of a mile—likely anyone can see the absurdity of that perspective with such a simple example.
This idea also disregards the stories of success not involving failure—are those successes less successful because they were accomplished more directly? We might argue that the experience of not reaching success directly is replete with important lessons not accessible otherwise, but if we’re looking strictly at the purpose of the endeavor, success is measured only by the final result—and failures along the way certainly don’t guarantee lessons.
In short, we can’t allow ourselves to become inappropriately enamored with the idea of failure being a tool of success through the misinterpretation of events. We need to distinguish between the natural process of attempting a given task or goal, which includes missteps and even backward steps along the way to completion, and genuine failure, which, by definition, means never completing or achieving the intended task or goal.
We can and should develop a productive mindset with regard to failure and how it can be best utilized in support of our objectives rather than allowed to be discouraging, but that doesn’t mean we seek it out or find it particularly valuable relative to other methods. It simply means that we possess the understanding that failure is a temporary step and a brief moment in a greater process, and have the confidence in our character, capability, capacity and commitment to continue pursuing the goal despite any setbacks for as long as it remains meaningful to us.
It’s equally critical that we never put ourselves in a fearful position of failure avoidance or risk aversion being primary arbiters of our decisions. That is, we don’t avoid failure by not taking risks when appropriate, we avoid it through better preparation and decisions. Success demands a balance between actively avoiding failure through the best possible decisions and planning with what’s available to us at the moment, and the willingness to fail temporarily that allows us to take bold action with its attendant risk. We’re willing to fail as a result of extending ourselves to reach great objectives, not to accept perfectly avoidable failure as a result of halfhearted attempts or haphazard choices. We can accept the risk of potential failure that accompanies overreaching because we’re committed to both the goal and the process—failure isn’t a dead end, but a change of course. Knowing failure is a possibility in any worthwhile endeavor, we resign ourselves to operate under its shadow, prepare as well as circumstances allow, and remain ready to exploit it to our advantage if and when it occurs.
When we look at failure with this attitude, it’s arguably better described as testing. That is, we’re bringing our ideas to the field and discovering how they perform, and using that feedback as we advance through the process to continually refine our plan to ensure its ultimate success. This attitude instantly transforms any setbacks in the process into constructive data rather than discouraging failures.
