The Subtle Art of Embracing Failure

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The Subtle Art of Embracing Failure

Weekly Brew #7: Embracing failure, the museum of failure, mistake vs failure & more

The Percolator

Jul 28, 2022

In this week’s brew:

The Subtle Art of Embracing Failure by Neelendra Nath
Visual Thought of the Week featuring creative shared by @visualizevalue
A twitter thread on Museum of Failure by Trung Phan

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The Subtle Art of Embracing Failure

One of the fundamental deterrent to action is the fear of failure. Nothing impedes our plans as much as the fear, that we will fail to make them happen. Yet, the truth is that for any endeavour worth taking, failure is the most probable outcome. Success, in the absolute sense of the word, on the other hand are rare events as they should be.

So, the question arises when failure is so natural and omnipresent why is there such a deep seated fear for the failure? For good reasons. In our evolutionary history, for most part, failure meant existential crisis. You died if you failed to outrun a predator. You died if you failed to find food. You died if you got lost in the wild. The cost of failure was too high. While, as species we have moved further from such high cost failures, our genetic memory still hold on to that fear. Thus, we need a conscious process to evaluate the cost of failure and not be bogged down by the exaggerated fear. But, to do any of that, the first step is to understand failure.

Let’s unpack!

white smoke on black background — Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

The Anatomy of Failure

Failure is neither an event, nor an action; It is a recognition. At some point of time we make a decision to recognize a scenario or an outcome to be a failure. As this recognition is subjective to individual perception, failure in itself is not an objective state. What might seem as failure to one, can actually be quite an opposite outcome to other. Growing up we have all known those kids who cried hoarse for scoring a few marks less than the perfect score, and we have also known those kids who cried with excitement after just barely earning the pass mark.

Like success, failure is also a very private achievement. Only the individual who is the subject to success or failure can decide for themselves whether they have or haven’t. Thus, we fail only when we decide that we have failed.

So, what makes us decide that we have failed? The anatomy of failure. Anatomy of the failure is made of five components:

Expectations: Every endeavour or action we set out for, starts with an intrinsic expectation of an outcome. When we socially share our endeavour, expectations of others also gets attached with our actions. Those expectations are actually a good thing as they work as great motivator for us, but if unrealistic they can be extremely overwhelming, and may set us for the failure from the very beginning.

Scale: Most of the thing, most of us do in our lives often have a scale attached to it. They are benchmarked based on what others around us have achieved while attempting similar endeavours. In some extremely standardized cases (education, competitive exams) they are quite objective whereas in other cases (quality of life, happiness, contentment) they can be very subjective. It is important that we benchmark ourselves and our endeavours well, so that there is no mismatch in our expectations and our scale.

Effort: Remember the earlier example of kid who got a few marks less than the perfect score. Our perception of failure is directly proportional to the effort that we put in to the endeavour. It is important to understand that there are many other variables that affect the outcomes. Thus, while we give our best effort, we shouldn’t expect the outcome to be directly proportional to that effort.

Cost of Recovery: In many situations one can face an adverse outcome and quickly recover from it. When the cost of this recovery is low, we might not even recognize the outcome as failure. Our perception of failure is stronger when the path to recovery seem bleak and cost of recovery seem beyond means.

Peer Response: Then there are also times when everything about our endeavour would turn out to be what we expected and quite good on all kind of standard benchmarks, yet we may feel like we have failed. The people around us, our peers hold enormous power over us and can cloud our own perception of reality. At times, failure can be just bad judges.

A conscious understanding of our ‘source of failure’ can help us recognize the true extent of unfavourable outcome, and thus empowers us to resolve the situation rather than lamenting it.

The Neuroscience of Failure

The failure is real and thus the fear of failure that we have is also very real. But what do we fear when we believe that we fear failure and what does happen to us when we actually fail. Let’s tackle the neuroscience behind them separately.

When we start an endeavour, we certainly do not do it with the intention of failing. While we of course want to succeed based on whatever metrics we have set, the outcome remains uncertain. A 2017 study at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London identified that the pathological anxiety that makes us feal scared of failure is not specific to failing itself, but linked more to the uncertainly of the outcome. When we accept failure as a possible outcome, we tend to be less fearful of it.

Now the second part, what happens to us when we fail. There is concept called winner effect, which says when someone wins, the brain releases testosterone and dopamine. When success is repeated with time, these secretions morphs the brain to make those successful more likely to succeed in future. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. Failure begets failure. A study has shown that when between two equally trained monkeys one made a mistake, the failure threw it off it capabilities and it tended to fail more afterwards. A person going off the diet once, is more likely to fall off the diet completely than those who never cheated.

The Art of Embracing Failure

Now that we know that what doesn’t kill us, make us weaker; it is important that we know our way out of that weakness. There are many adages such as ‘Fail Fast’ or ‘Fail Forward’, but to be honest as much as possible don’t fail. Let me explain.

Again, failure is not an objective state of events. It is a recognition of an end state of situation which we believe has not turned out favourable to us. If we do not believe we have abjectly failed, then we have not failed. So, the first step towards not failing is to understand all possible outcomes of the endeavour that you are setting upon and then, those which might seem like cases for failure, embrace them as a probability. Embrace the failure, not that you have faced but the ones which you know are possible in the future.

Any astute investor will tell you to identify your risk capacity before entering the market and then write off some of your most risky investments with no expectations of returns. Same holds true for the most of the actions that we take. Write some of them off, and for rest understand your risk capacity well.

Still there will be some cases, when our own expectations will beat us and we will feel like a failure. When that time arrives, be mindful that failure begets failure. More you would dwell on the failure, longer you will remain off your game and will be more likely to fail again. Instead of dwelling on failure, reframe it to understand how many good things came out of it, then pick them as learning and move on. Set a further goal and reduce the current outcome to just one misstep in the larger scheme of things. Once again, embrace the failure but only in the form of learning.

Remember, you have failed only when you have decided that you have failed.