How to cope with failure
Summary: Failure can be uncomfortable, but it’s a great teacher. This issue offers a few ideas on how to cope with inevitable failures and still learn from them.
(~4 min read)
#1. Learn how to fail like pro athletes
Psychologist Orion Taraban says, “If you’re going to be great, you have to learn how to fail.”
The two are interlinked.
For Taraban, we can take inspiration on how to deal with failure from professional athletes.
Think of the greatest basketball players of all time—Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James. As Taraban puts it: together, these three players have lost more games than most players will ever win over their entire careers—“just by virtue of the fact that they’ve been so great for so long.”
Or take baseball.
The all-time, greatest hitters in baseball have a career batting average of less than .400. This means “that the very best hitters in the history of that sport failed to get a hit more times than they succeeded.”
The lesson is: the path to mastery involves passing through a lot of failure. So, to be great in whatever you do, requires coming to an emotional acceptance of failure.
Here’s how a professional athlete like LeBron James might react to a lost game, when facing reporters at the postgame press conference:
“Yeah, we weren’t passing very well. And we were missing our free throws, which obviously we can’t do. The other team played really well, they showed some good hustle … but right now, we’re just forced on tomorrow’s game and we’ll get ‘em next time.”
For Taraban, this is the perfect way to react to failure.
There are three aspects of this reaction to failure that we can all learn from and use:
1. Recognizing what things could be improved (e.g., poor passing, missed free throws). This offers evidence of what led to the failure while also highlighting specific things that can be improved for the future.
2. A non-defensive acceptance of the failure.
3. The result and reaction is ultimately forward-looking: “there is no inclination to ruminate or sulk.”
#2. Better to be on the field and losing than in the stands
In his book The War of Art, author Steven Pressfield writes “Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it’s for failure.”
Pressfield shares the following story about one of his own failures to illustrate this lesson.
His first professional writing job, after seventeen years of trying, was for a movie called King Kong Lives. Pressfield and his partner on the movie, Ron Shusett, created the screenplay for the acclaimed director Dino DiLaurentiis.
Pressfield and Shusett were certain they had a blockbuster, and invited everyone they knew to the premiere. They even rented out the place next door for the triumphant after-party: “Get there early, we warned our friends, the place’ll be mobbed.“
But nobody came.
Pressfield remembers one guy who was standing in line beside their guests, but he was muttering something about spare change. In the theater, Pressfield and Shusett’s friends endured the movie “in mute stupefaction,” and when it was over, “they fled like cockroaches into the night.”
The next day, a review of the movie in Variety magazine dealt a further blow: “… Ronald Shusett and Steven Pressfield; we hope these are not their real names, for their parents’ sake.”
They were crushed.
As Pressfield tells it: here he was, forty-two years old, divorced, childless, having given up all normal pursuits to chase the dream of being a writer. He finally had his name attached to a big-time Hollywood production, and he blew it: “I’m a loser, a phony; my life was worthless, and so am I.”
But one of Pressfield’s friends snapped him out of it by asking if he was going to quit.
Pressfield’s answer was “Hell, no!”
His friend continued: “Then be happy. You’re where you wanted to be, aren’t you? So you’re taking a few blows. That’s the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.”
That’s when Pressfield realized that he had become a professional. He didn’t yet have a success, but he’d had a real failure.
#3. Imagine failure now to prevent it in the future
Failure may be a good teacher, but if you could avoid it you probably would. One way to decrease your odds of failure is to imagine exactly what it might eventually look like.
Decision making expert Gary Klein writes in the Harvard Business Review that projects can fail because people are reluctant to voice their concerns during the planning phase.
Klein recommends conducting a “premortem” at the beginning of a project to discuss those concerns, and to increase a project’s likelihood of success.
A premortem is the “hypothetical opposite” of a postmortem. Whereas a postmortem aims to understand what happened after a project is complete, a premortem starts with the premise that the project has failed.
The task is to generate plausible reasons for the failure, and to prevent it from happening.
Klein gives the example of a team at a Fortune 50 company that conducted a premortem on a planned billion-dollar environmental sustainability project.
The project leader began the premortem with the assumption that the project failed. Everyone in the session then took several minutes to write down every possible cause of the failure.
One executive suggested that the project failed because employees lost interest after the CEO retired. Another attributed the failure to a government agency’s policy change, and the negative impact this had on the business case.
An important benefit of a premortem is that it makes team members more sensitive to early signs of risk or trouble once the project has started.
As Klein puts it, “a premortem may be the best way to circumvent any need for a painful postmortem.”
Quote of the week
“The sweat of success is failure. While you can’t build cardiovascular endurance without sweating, you can’t experience success without failure. Failure is simply a natural response to success. If you avoid failure you will also avoid success.”
-MJ Demarco in his book The Millionaire Fastlane