Celebrating Failure Might Be the Secret to Your Success

In high school, I ran for student government twice. The second year, I got elected. The first year . . . not so much. In fact, the speech I gave the first year goes down in history as my most embarrassing moment to date.

Moments before the assembly, I was sitting in Spanish class. The girl in front of me – a senior – inquired why I was furiously scribbling notes.

“I’m writing my campaign speech.”

“Ooooh let me help. I’m great at speeches,” she said. She was a cheerleader, if I recall correctly, or some other (popular) thing besides just an upperclassman that made me believe her suggestions would give me the upper hand.

Five minutes later she had re-written my intro to say the following:

Hi. My name is Jennie O. That’s J-E-N-N-O, not J-E-L-L-O.

Pause.

The pause was included, presumably, to allow for the invariable laughter.

Except that when I delivered the line, there was no laughter. There were only . . . crickets.

An uncomfortable cough.

And a handful of my nearest and dearest friends breaking eye contact with me and fidgeting uncomfortably, as if doing so would disassociate themselves with the most embarrassing candidate on the stage.

It’s no wonder, really. What the actual heck was I thinking? I don’t introduce myself as Jennie O. That’s a brand of ground turkey. And Jennie O isn’t spelled J-E-N-N-O anyway! And relating my name to the Jello jingle is not, in any realm of existence, a funny thing to do!

Uuuuuugh. Even recalling this memory more than 20 years later makes my armpits sweat.

So why am I telling you this?

Because I have relived this mortifying moment FAR more times than is healthy, even though I know nobody remembers it but me. I have let the memory rattle my confidence and bruise my ego and make me terrified to stand in front of a class and teach what I know for decades.

End “Fear of Failure” Paralysis

Fear of failure keeps so many of us frozen in place. It ensures we stay the small, quiet guy in the back watching the world go by and wondering what the people out there living it up have that we don’t.

But I’ll tell you a secret. The only difference between the wallflowers and the go-getters is that the go-getters give fewer fucks about failing. I’m not saying they’ve conquered their fear of it; it’s just that they do it so often, it’s taken some of the sting out.

So by that logic, if we could get comfortable with failure, hell, if we could actually embrace it, we can greatly reduce its power over us and start allowing our ideas, our art and ourselves to be visible.

And How?

That’s all well and good, you might be thinking, but how do I just “get okay” with failure?

Fair question.

To answer it, let me introduce you to a few folks who have used this counterintuitive truth to become brave AF. Here’s a quick run-down:

Jia Jang writes about the power of exposure therapy in Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection. He was inspired to write the book so he could get better at hearing the word “no” – something which had always terrified him. He came up with 100 requests, ranging from innocuous to wild, and learned a lot about the art of asking in the process. Turns out how confident you sound has a lot to do with the answer you’ll get. He also discovered that people say “yes” a lot more often than expected.

Kristen Hadeed, the founder of Student Maid and author of Permission to Screw Up, has her team create failure resumes. They list the most disastrous failures in their lives and then look for the gift in each one – the lesson the failure was attempting to teach. They then add to their resilience arsenals by asking themselves, “What will I do next time if I’m confronted with a similar situation?”

CEO of Spanx, Sara Blakely, schedules “oops meetings” where employees stand up and talk about a mistake they made, often turning it into a funny story. Her logic is that if she can create a culture where her employees are not terrified to fail, they’ll be more productive and innovative. And if the success of the Spanx brand is any indication, it works.

And finally, the inimitable Brené Brown gave a TED talk about how she devoted her life to researching shame and vulnerability as a means by which to kick vulnerability’s ass. When her data indicated that vulnerability was essential to healthy, heart-centered living, she had a breakdown – a fact she revealed before an audience of 500 people that day.

In the days following her speech, the shame of admitting such an embarrassment kept her house-bound. Her fear that once the recording was aired on YouTube even more people would have access to it was almost more than she could bear. “If 500 turns into 1,000 or 2,000, my life is over,” she said to a friend a few days later.

She had no contingency plan for 4 million—a number that makes hers one of the most viewed TED talks in the world.

And her life, as she knew it, did end—in that she recognized a hard truth about herself. She discovered that as much as she had been frustrated about not getting her work out into the world, there was a part of her that was working very hard to engineer staying small. And by being vulnerable, she ratcheted herself into the big leagues, so her message could finally be heard by the millions of people who so desperately needed to hear it.

So to make failure less scary you can use exposure therapy, create a failure resume, host your own “oops meeting” or do something crazy vulnerable. Or you make it even simpler . . .

Embrace Imperfection

It’s okay for a child who is just learning about language to make grammatical mistakes, right? If you apply that same logic to doing anything at which you are a beginner, it’s okay for you to make mistakes, too. Bottom line: if something is worth doing (read: the thought won’t leave you alone), then it’s worth doing badly.

Studies show that children become more adventurous and experimental when they are complimented on how hard they try and how great it is that they keep trying. On the other hand, when kids are simply told they’re smart and good at things, they actually become fearful of damaging their perfect image.

It’s through repeatedly trying and failing that we gain skills and self-efficacy, or the belief that we can make things work. Furthermore, the willingness to fail is a crucial step to developing confidence.

Try taking tiny steps—like writing only 200 words a day toward your novel. The effect of this is two-fold: when the standard of success is merely acting and when any result is regarded as progress, we move past our fear of starting.

And tiny steps mean tiny failures, which are easier to abide and help remind us that we’re learning and becoming more resilient at the same time.

Stop Identifying With Failure

There is such powerful unconscious energy around the word failure that we can really benefit from examining our use of it. The next time you experience failure, immediately notice your own thoughts. You have had a failure, but you ARE NOT a failure.

When it’s not you that it’s happening to, the word failure isn’t the be-all-end-all. It simply means something that didn’t go according to plan. It doesn’t represent, as Brené discovered, the worst possible outcome.

But when we identify with it, and even when we label others with that identity, we lose sight of the fact that it’s not the worst thing on earth. We allow it to become hyperbole, a maniacal werewolf in our mind’s eye when a tiny wolf pup is a far more accurate representation. It then acts as a deterrent, preventing us from taking risks—which is a word our brain attaches to literally anything that changes the status quo.

So if you want to better your life and any step you take involves risk and thus carries the possibility of failure, the only reasonable option, then, is to see failure as an ally.

Visualize a Pig

Once, when I was struggling to get over the fact that an ex leapt out of our relationship straight into a new one, someone suggested I visualize his new girlfriend as a pig. It sounds bonkers, but once I added a coat of lipstick, the frequently unbidden thought of his new GF never failed to make me laugh out loud.

I was mind-boggled, you guys. It was the first time I recognized that a reframe is often all you need to snuff the power out of a thing.

So why not try it with failure?

Think of your next faceplant as nothing more than a minor setback. Give it a new name – like blunder, silly mistake or learning experience. Start a “What Not To Do” list and keep it next to your To-Do list. Celebrate each new addition . . . because the more you have on your list, the more capable you are of avoiding obstacles in the future.

Begin greeting failure with excitement because it means you’re making progress. I’ve been using this approach with fear (I set a goal to do something scary every day in the new year), and it’s allowed me to welcome the stomach butterflies as a sign that I’m growing.

Or simply visualize a lipsticked pig taking possession of your body and making you look like an asshat.

You’re welcome.

Gamify Losing

What if we took a page from Jia Jiang’s book (literally) and pushed ourselves to do something new and scary every day . . . and actually aspired to fail at it?

Of course, you’d have to add caveats.

If you’re simply doing it to become numb to failure, you could do the worst job possible.

But if you’re trying to employ reverse psychology to trick yourself into making progress on your big, audacious dreams, I recommend you give each task the old college try. Tell yourself you succeed by failing, which in this case, is true.

But, of course, you also succeed by succeeding. Think of it as #winning at life. Simply taking action (as long as it’s “scaryciting”) makes you a BOSS.

I’m in love with the idea and think it would be a fun group activity.

Anybody up for a failure contest? With the added side-bonus of possibly becoming wildly successful? Drop a note in the comments and let me know!