The Only L’s We Take Are Lessons: A short interlude on failure

Failure has been on my mind a lot recently. We all fail, yet there’s this weird way we perceive it culturally. It seems like everyone has all of this weight on their shoulders where there’s something they must do, or they become a “failure”. Whether it’s in our career or personal life we all have these make-or-break tasks that we use to define our self-worth. This weight is only getting heavier, which goes against older generations’ rallies of a “participation trophy” culture where “winning” doesn’t seem to matter. Winning matters more than ever, especially on a personal level. This immense pressure to achieve is impacting the way we all see the world and ourselves. 

Let’s start off with how the fear of failure can be healthy in low or moderate doses. Fear of failing motivates us to do things we actually care about. If we didn’t care about something there’d be no fear of failure. Why would you care about succeeding at something that didn’t matter to you? You wouldn’t. If you actually care about something, you don’t want to fail at it. That in turn drives you to do all you can to avoid failure. The risk of failure is also potent. If there wasn’t that risk of failure then succeeding wouldn’t mean as much. Part of the joy in “winning” is that you overcame that risk and fear. Evolutionarily, failure was also a huge motivator. Failure basically meant death to our ancestors, so it was something they had to avoid at all costs. That fear drove them to “win” at the game of life and eventually become us. So failure does have the benefit of driving us all to succeed at the things we care about. 

Failure is also a loaded term. It’s harsh and brings up lots of emotions for many of us. We don’t like to fail and definitely don’t like being called failures. The thing is though when you look at what it actually is, it’s really not that big of a deal. It simply means not meeting a goal. Which is something that happens to all of us. No matter who you are, you never make every shot. Michael Jordan only made 50% of his shots in the NBA. Which is honestly still pretty good, but he still missed half of the time. We all miss, and that’s ok. We can learn from those misses and move on. The issue is how we perceive those misses and what we think it means about us. 

Our perception of failure often stems from our own insecurity. We’re insecure about not meeting this insane level of perfection that our culture values. So when we fail we view it as an indictment of ourselves. It’s a crack in our armor of perfection that we all spend so much time trying to build. Whether it’s through social media, how we talk, how we dress, or the way we act at work, we’re constantly trying to show the world we’re perfect. With that comes the constant stress of not meeting that ideal. This stress is at the root of our fear of failure. It leaves us rigid and fearful that if we take the risk and fail, then someone might not perceive us as perfect.

It’s not just the fear of others seeing our flaws that leads us to try to avoid failure. It’s also about the fear that we’ll see our own flaws. To fail or not meet a goal sucks, and it’s tough to face that. It’s even tougher if you already deal with self-worth problems. You already view yourself as a failure so when it happens it just confirms what you’ve always thought. This is especially tough in situations when you’re facing a rejection of some sort. As people who deal with these issues, we’ve grown up rejecting ourselves and projecting that rejection of ourselves onto others. Again the failure serves as a reinforcement of what we’ve always thought. This creates this vicious cycle where the fear of confirming that negative bias against ourselves prevents us from trying to do anything where the risk of that confirmation happens. 

This fear prevents us from doing the things that we need to do to grow. What we don’t realize is that the fear is often greater than the risk. Unlike our ancestors, very rarely does not meeting our goals mean death, it might feel like we’re going to die but we’re not. We have to get past that biological programming in order to pursue the things we want. That’s not to say “you just have to suck it up and do it”. You do have to do that sometimes, but that’s kind of insensitive bullshit. If you need help doing something ask for it. Talk to a therapist or a friend about what you’re struggling with and what goals you want to reach. We can also reframe how we look at failure. Failure isn’t really an all-or-nothing thing. You’re not defined by your failures. As much it may hurt, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It just means that it didn’t work out this time. 

The flip side of failure that we don’t talk about is that it shows something about you. Not something negative but something positive. It shows that you tried, which is more important than any outcome. Sure it’d be better if you didn’t fail, but facing your fear is what matters. That act of trying is what life’s about. The more you do that, the more opportunities you have to succeed. It’d be easier to not try, but then you’d never win. None of us are perfect all the time, and none of us win all the time. So take a chance, if it doesn’t work out see what you can take from it, make a new plan, and just try again. That’s all we can do. The only L’s we take are lessons.