…Failure is inherent to success.
They’re not opposites. One is a precursor to the other, or one might even say they are the same thing.
Most of our educational system is set up to believe that we should do things in one go.
“Here is something you should study. Everyone gets the same amount of information, regardless of what your starting level is, and everyone should get more than 60% right. Otherwise you fail the test.” You can re-do the test once, but then everybody already knows you ‘failed the first time’. No wonder we have so many people suffering from a chronic fear of failing. Impostor syndrome. Perfectionism. If you score a 10, you’re an amazing student. Let’s not focus on how much you grew, how much effort you put in.
The human mind is both amazing, and horrible in that it remembers things that go wrong better than things that go right. It’s an evolutionary advantage. We need to be able to fix things that can either kill us or be a danger to us. We don’t need to change a lot about things that went right, but situations that are dangerous require our attention. Our brain is naturally hard-wired to keep us alive effectively, not necessarily to keep us happy all the time.
So, imagine we create an environment where we as a society endorse feeling shame, and we stop there. We stop at the first gut-reaction that comes up when we make a mistake, a mistake being defined as anything that you did or say that didn’t have the perceived outcome that you had in mind and which you feel bad about. What does it do? It makes us want to avoid making mistakes. Because mistakes are a bad thing. They make you less of a person. They make people around you view you with pity, with contempt. Making mistakes in our culture, is punished. Enter a whole generation of people who are so worried about failing, that they basically become paralyzed. They don’t try to share their vulnerabilities or humanity that connects us all (because being flawed, either physically or emotionally, is in our current society basically the same as failing).
Now imagine that we create a society where we understand that it is actually amazing that we remember things better once we’ve “screwed them up”. Remember those times when you finished a test, and afterwards you only remember the one question that you got wrong? Remember that moment when you fancied someone and you did something stupid like trip in front of them? It’s amazing. This is our brain’s capacity to adapt. Shame is an important emotion. It tells us that we value something. That we want to grow in a certain way. But the way we deal with shame nowadays is that we push it away or try to avoid it altogether instead of just letting it exist and trying to look deeply into what it is telling us. It might tell us: “I want to be respected in the eyes of others”, or “I really want to be able to master this and make it a part of my identity”. Try to listen to what it is really trying to say. Recognize that the words your shame uses are usually not its real intention. “I am stupid, I can’t do this”, for example, is merely a thought coming from the desire to be an adequate person, to be respected and valued.
Instead of seeing shame as an final (undesirable) destination, what if we see it as a process that can teach us something. We allow it to move through our bodies and minds without letting it paralyze us.
I like to read stories about people, who in our culture’s perspective have succeeded. Stephen King who was once a janitor, Walt Disney and how he was told he lacked imagination, Elvis who was told he shouldn’t sing and go back to driving trucks. Countless others. Failure isn’t bad. It is absolutely and utterly essential to discovering what we want and need, and how to do it.
Where does this unrealistic and harmful idea come from that every destination that we aim for, should be flawless, a smoothly paved path? How else could we ever discover new corners of our mind, new shores of our abilities? We need to bump our feet to know there’s a rock there, we need to go somewhere first to realize that we don’t really like that particular spot. We’re hard-wired to grow this way.
Mistakes aren’t something to be avoided, they are something to be celebrated.
The process of hitting a wall, and making ‘mistakes’ is not only part of “success”, overcoming these barriers IS success.
Let’s go out there, and fail as much as we can. Do the thing that you secretly want more than anything else. The thing that’s most important to your identity. The thing that scares you. Fail, and with that, succeed on growing. Succeed, on overcoming your fears.
