We need more FAILURES around here!

“We need more failures around here” said no one ever. EXCEPT….in a lab of some sort. Think about it, science and biology labs experience a ton of failures prior to finding a solution that can revolutionize our lives. Pharmaceutical labs chase failures day after day knowing that all the failures offer the quickest path to success in creating medicine that can save lives or improve the quality of life we’re able to experience. Environmental labs push hard through a multitude of failures attempting to find energy efficiency without negatively impacting our fragile ecology. Failures are good. Solutions are better.

Lack of failures = stagnation, or worse, negative direction. So, why does our culture treat failure so harshly? Especially what we perceive as personal failure? The answer lies with splitting our current culture into separate groups.

                  In the business world, Startup culture glorifies “fail fast,” but only retroactively after they can pinpoint the failure that led to success. Nobody celebrates the failure that just failed. Startup culture loves a redemption arc, but not so much an actual flop. That’s one group. The Social Media culture group has made failure a spectator event. Where mistakes were previously private and forgettable; Social Media has made our mistakes permanent and screenshot-able. OUCH! That increases the perceived cost of making even a single mistake which can lead to fear, anxiety, and stress just attempting to have a normal productive day. This is where we can fall into the trap of letting what other people think of us determining our every move, rather than believing in ourselves enough to be confident in all that we do.

                  I’ve frequently shared that the most important conversation we have each day is the conversation we have with ourselves. The phraseology and wording become critically important when talking to ourselves. Example? There’s a huge difference in telling ourselves, “I am a failure” versus “I failed at something and learned from the failure.” In our mind we’re creating an identity from either statement that we broadcast to others who then utilize it to form an opinion about us and often use it to judge us unfairly. It’s worth taking a look at how a failure perspective develops in each of us.

                  My research shows that when we’re young, we learn that praise and warmth are shared with us for good performance and withdrawn from us for bad performance. Failure stops being information and becomes a threat to belonging.  Our actual “fear of failure” takes root in middle childhood, roughly ages 7-11, when we develop real social comparison. We start to measure ourselves against peers and begin imagining what others think of us. Schooling has a huge impact on our perspective that can live with us throughout our life. The grading we receive turns into an identity and also a ranking against our classmates.

The negative cost of failure starts early in life. When you consider that schools are set up to reward compliance and correct answers while penalizing creative wrong ones, you begin to notice that we’re trained to pursue risk aversion as a survival skill. Think about this: Praising kids for being smart creates a fixed mindset that leads those kids to choose easier tasks to protect the label. Praise for effort and strategy does the opposite. Risk always includes the possibility of failure, so it’s easy for us to pursue a thought process based on eliminating all risk which, in turn means eliminating failure. That’s such a difficult way to live life.

Our educators have earned my respect and admiration. Teaching our children is what has led to the incredible way of life we all enjoy today. Teachers are the perfect example of a willingness to embrace what managed failure can lead to. What they’re currently providing is hope. There’s a movement towards mastery-based grading that promotes “productive failure.” Productive failure lets students struggle before instruction. It encourages risk-taking, creative solutions, and outside-the-box thinking. It also encourages taking risks that may or may not lead to failure and acts as a steppingstone for problem solving and the tenacity of never giving up.

Can a person get excited about failure? Yes, especially when it leads to the mentality that they’re one step closer to success. Decades ago, I coined a phrase: “Winners never lose! They either WIN or they LEARN!” Any failure means something was learned, even if the conclusion ends up being: now I know what didn’t work.

I’ve realized that every successful person I admire has had a lot of failures that their success was built upon. That includes people in my work life, social life, faith life, friendship life, mentoring life, health life, neighbor life, financial life, and community life. In many cases, their failures have helped prevent my own failure in specific areas of life. That only occurred because they had high levels of compassion for helping others and a firm belief in themselves, knowing they’re not perfect but consistently attempting to be a better person today than they were yesterday.

It’s almost like their perspective has been that each failure along the way was really a success in and of itself along the path to living a consistently happy, joyful, and successful life. Are they wrong? Are they crazy for embracing a “We need some more failures around here” mentality? Along with being well-adjusted individuals, they seem to be the people having the most fun. At first, I laughed when a friend of mine exclaimed “At my company, you can make as many mistakes as you want…(long pause)…as long as you never make the same mistake twice!” After thinking about it, I fell in love with the learning thought process it promoted and utilized it with the people I worked alongside.

So, what about YOU? What would it take for you to proclaim each day; “We need more failures around here!”? You could begin by never allowing any failure to become your identity. Author and Speaker Helize “Sparky” Bridges taught me that all of us crave 3 things every day: Appreciation, Respect, and Love. Fear of failure can best be dealt with when you first show yourself Appreciation, Respect, and Love. Once you categorize failure appropriately and embrace it when it occurs, you can share your Appreciation, Respect, and Love with every other person you come in contact with throughout the day. That’s when you’ll feel comfortable shouting “We need more failures around here!” and after the laughter subsides, be able to share and explain this powerful new thought process with others. Hey…I Believe In YOU! GiddyUp!