Failure
If optimism is the expectation of success, what do we do when we fail? Ignore it? Downplay it? Surely failure unmasks the optimist as the fantasist he claims not to be and proves the pessimist right.
There are several ways in which failure is not only compatible with an optimistic outlook but can enhance it. To be alive is to accept that you will fail sometimes. To expect continuous success is to risk sending yourself into continuous freefall.
The following strategy for successful failure applies to the arts, business, politics, science, future-forecasting and any other area of life in which ambition lurks. 1. Success and failure are subjective and relative.
You could say that failure is just information interpreted by our brains. It is we who load it with connotations and emotions, particularly if we compare ourselves to other people or let them judge us. Curiously, you can succeed in the eyes of the world and still feel like a failure because you are too demanding. Lord Reith, founder of the BBC, for instance, set the bar for himself impossibly high and was perpetually dissatisfied as a result, but is remembered with admiration for his achievements. It doesn’t help that we live in a culture obsessed by ‘performance’ and ‘targets’ and in which criticism (in the negative sense) is the norm: if you sail past your targets a year after your deadline, is that success or failure?
2. Failure is almost always temporary.
Substitute obstacle and setback and you can see it in a different light. Of course, you can die while trying to reach the pole…
3. There is a lot to learn from failure.
Ask any toddler about the truth of this. It’s wise not to launch yourself down a black ski run unless you know how to fall over without hurting yourself. Few entrepreneurs succeed first time: they pay attention to their mistakes, refine their products and methods, and wade straight back into the water. To learn from your errors is certainly humbling but it doesn’t have to be humiliating. As the song advises:
Don’t lose your confidence if you slip, be grateful for a pleasant trip,
pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.
Failure forces us to be flexible, to try another way. If you can’t think of anything different to do, try thinking (qv).
4. Success is much more satisfying if it doesn’t come
easily (honest).
The process of life is at least half the fun. Or as Idries Shah puts it a little wistfully in The Magic
Monastery: “The expected apricot is never as sweet
when it reaches the mouth”. If you are the kind of person who likes such cod wisdom dressed up in scientific language, you should consult an expert in psychophysics – “the study of the psychological
impact of physical events” – which, says Robert Provine, author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation indicates that:
“More is not always better, and that greener grass, once acquired, quickly starts to yellow… The second million dollars, like the second Ferrari, does not equal the satisfaction provided by the first, and a second Nobel is pretty much out of the question, a dilemma of past laureates. Goals once obtained become the new standard, to which we adapt, before continuing our race up the escalating, slippery slope of acquisitiveness and fame… Philosophers and scientists from antiquity to the present generally agree that life is a marathon, not a sprint, and the formula for happiness and well-being is the journey — not achievement of the goal — and the comfort of friends and family.”
Psychiatrists and religious teachers call the ability to wait for rewards ‘delayed gratification’ and if you are an averagely adjusted neurotic you should have learned how to delay your own gratification by the age of five. In fact (you’re not going to like this if you are hell bent on success) ...
5. Suffering and hardship are what make us grow as
individuals.
According to M. Scott Peck in The Road Less
Traveled, we just have to get on and take the knocks
so that we can emerge stronger the other side. In other words, you should embrace failure. It means you are on the right road.
6. It is possible to peak too soon.
Many great artists and writers have done their best work in their 20s and been obliged to live their lives in the knowledge that they will never quite deliver on that early promise or recapture their lost glory. To be lauded as a genius on the basis of one juvenile work can make your continuing underachievement all the more painful. Tennessee Williams sadly wrote about himself:
“if only I could get the coloured lights going in my brain!...The talent died in me from overexposure, sort of sunstroke under the baleful sun of success…The way down is long and it continues…”
And, of course, if you live your entire life as a celebrity you can never have normal experiences of what life is really like for the rest of us: the best preparation for writing a great novel is, as Cervantes, discovered 60 years of fighting, imprisonment, poverty and obscurity.
Actually, I should qualify my put-down of early success. David Galenson, economics professor at Chicago University, has defined two types of creative people – experimental and conceptual innovators.
“Experimental innovators work slowly, try things out, use the methods that work and abandon those that don’t. Their masterpieces, like those of Cezanne, tend to come late in their lives. Conceptual innovators, like Picasso, formulate new ideas at an early age.”
Although he is talking about artists, the principle could apply just as easily to scientists or anyone else. He calls the young achievers ‘finders’ – they have “one extraordinary idea before preconceived habits of thought” set in and they use it to break boundaries before they settle down to a slow fade. Late achievers are ‘seekers’ who are “slow-bubbling, uncertain, cautious, experimental; they believe the essence of creativity lies in the process of making the work” rather than the work itself.
7. Failure can be a reliable way of discovering what we
really want to do or what is best for us.
Through failing we can refine our objectives. Would you rather be rich, famous and inundated with offers of sex right now even though you know you’re a sham or be acclaimed as genius posthumously, your reputation assured for the next couple of millennia? The choice doesn’t have to be quite so stark. Isabel Allende, then a journalist now a world-famous novelist, was sent by a magazine to interview the poet Pablo Neruda. When her piece was published, Neruda was disappointed. She was poor at handling facts, he said, perhaps she should try fiction.
So, don’t waste time. Get out there and fail. “If I had to live my life over again,” said Tallulah Bankhead, “I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”