If there were any piece of advice I would offer to anyone starting a new venture in life, it would be this: court failure.
Failure is a dirty word in our culture. It has a potent negative connotation that sends chills up many a spine, mostly the spines of people who don’t do much.
That’s not a criticism but an observation. You cannot succeed without failures and you can’t succeed without doing a lot of work. So if you’re doing a lot of work, you’re failing more than infrequently.
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
-Mark Twain
How to Court Failure
Every day that you get up and work toward a goal in a new arena, you are courting failure. You’re inviting problems for which you don’t yet have solutions, attempting tasks for which you don’t yet have skills, and often planning a future that you don’t yet know how you’ll pay for. You’ll make mistakes in most every category.
I started a new business this year. I literally can’t count all the failures I’ve experienced in less than six months. But I’m still having fun so I hardly notice them.
That’s not entirely true. Sometimes they hurt and made me kick myself. But I am comforted by the thought that when this happens, it’s because I’m courting failure, a necessary action on the route to … to where exactly?
Another Dirty Word
I know you may be irritated with me for goin’ all Zen on ya, but it is a fact that we spend so much time trying to categorize the actions of our lives into successes and failures that we miss a lot of life as it passes by every day.
Success is not the opposite of failure; it’s merely the other end of the see-saw. When we persist in labeling success as failure’s opposite, our focus becomes skewed and we live with an anxiety that saps the creative energy required to move forward.
We don’t often stop to question where our definitions of success and failure come from. I’m not talking about the etymological origins but the sociological origins. Who imposes these ideas of success and failure upon us? No one, really. We willingly put them on like a hand-me-down coat and wear them like the king’s robes.
Living by Choice
While sitting on my front steps after a run this morning, I caught myself ruminating somewhat anxiously about the future of my business. As I looked up at the early-morning spring sun glowing through verdant, newly-leafed trees, I suddenly decided, “I am going to live this day.”
I wanted to simply experience the day in whatever form it arrived, watch how it interleaved itself with my life and my plans (or interrupted them), and just live. I wanted to acknowledge the uncertainty of tomorrow and the day after, knowing that it would be a sin to allow that uncertainty to mar today.
I was partly … “successful.” On and off through the day, I prodded myself to come back to this thought, to this living in the day. Sometimes it worked and sometimes the rush of traffic beside me or the question of a stranger pulled me back into the swirl of ruminating about the future. But in those moments, I was successfully courting failure as well.
The degree with which we can live without anxiety about what a particular moment or event in life means is the measure of how much we actually live. One way to reduce the anxiety about whether or not we’re successful is to be conscious of courting failure. When we truly see the value in failure, both success and failure assume equal weight, neither to be fully trusted nor feared nor expected to fill our every day. Neither is an end in itself.
Tomorrow, when you get up, try for just one day to court failure.
Lisa’s Comments: I absolutely love this article because it not only applies to our websites, but our day to day lives. Your perspective and attitude make all the difference.
If you interview every successful Internet marketer, I bet they will have stories of failure. I have plenty. Without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today. It’s not how many times you fail, but what you do with the lessons that blossom from those failures.
Brian V. Hunt spent more than a decade as a senior writer at Microsoft. He’s an SEO copywriter, performs search engine optimization, is a senior copywriter, and writes sell sheets for clients at B2B corporations and commercial web sites. Get more tips from him on writing for the web and SEO at http://brianvhunt.com.
I always believe that failure makes you tough if you know how to face it and it teaches you how to start all over again, which is the most important thing in do anything; knowing the start. Thank you for giving such a beautiful post. It will inspire people and encourage them also.
I’ve often been so afraid of failure that I am afraid of venturing into anything new. I’m slowing learning that failure can be a useful thing, especially in the lessons that it provides. Thanks for the reminder.
really very interesting article, i could not agree with you more on this..
Accept your failure is just the starting point, the most important fact lies in getting up from where you left off and starting all over again….
Persist in one area and thou shall succeed
Failure is such an unpleasant term in life if we take it negatively but if we try to look deeper and learn to appreciate failure then it can turn us into a stronger and better person. I believe that failure is the best teacher.
Hi Brian,
Failure is part of life. Just as succes is.
However, fear of failure is something to get rid of as fast as possible. One of the easiest to use methods is EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques. EFT is easy to use and gives almost instant results.
Wow, thanks for that article, there were so many different aspects to success and failure in this issue that I don’t know how to add to this except to say Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it.
So, so true, Arlene.
thanks for sharing
Failures in our life can keep us down or make us strong to be consistent in the path we want our dreams to unfold. Success is something we must grab hold too, in our mind we want to succeed, but it takes support and encouragement and a choice to want to succeed. This blog is awesome!
Cartoon Coach‘s No Risk Coaching Program🙂
Tru dat. Lisa’s blog is always awesome. She provides a real service and gives away more than she sells.
Thanks for reminding that even succeeding is not the destination, consistency pays! Failure is never final and success is never ending!
I think of failure as a mean to keep us as followers (a ‘post’ to lean). In some cultures that is more as an obligation than an option.
– Marcos
This really resonated. Especially after the last 48 hours we’ve had trying to add an rss/mp3/audio/lame encoder/library/audacity project to our wordpress blog. Failure is a mild way to put it. A hellacious 3 days later still not sure where we are. But what is failure, really? Arguably, it would be giving up and saying, #$%^ the blog, bleep the podcast, who cares if we make it better with a podcast or not? Trying to improve (even if you fail) is success. Success is trying. Failure is not giving a phock and worrying about why you don’t give a phock when you should give a phock even if you don’t. Or maybe it’s the other way around
Thanks for the great article! Well said “The degree with which we can live without anxiety about what a particular moment or event in life means is the measure of how much we actually live.”
Committing mistakes is just natural for a human being. After all, through our mistake, we are able to learn new things. Great people are successful because they already learned from their mistakes. Thanks for the post. Great!
Hi again Brian, Lisa:
Failure can be a (step to) success (whatever means for us in terms of money, friendships, inner peace… or a balance of things) if it show (teach) us the way, or “if we are prepared and want’ to get it.
For example, I now realize (by experience) that some things are very important to people, to neglect, miss, or minimize its importance (if I truly care so for people, not only their money) if I want to have and keep a successful, sustainable, profitable blog.
The sooner we realize that, from past mistakes, and keep positive, the sooner we move on to success.
Thank You again for this Blog, Lisa, and Brian for your positive contribution to the net.
-Marcos
Hi Brian Hunt
I think ‘failures and successes’ are interchanging (although Microsoft culture of perfection nobody is) step or states of mind or how we see things.
Lisa and you are examples of that we thank for.
We are used and reinforced to think about them in the conventional way (furthermore, some were physically punished in their childhood for ‘fail’ so creating fixations about the theme) and it’s measured different for different cultures’ as you argue, also.
Positive thinking and emotions (love, forgiveness, peace, optimism, change or evolve, happiness plenitude…) drive or connect us to success (where reside those emotions for the ‘good guys who follows the rules’), and the lack of that positive thinking pull and keep us chained to (I apologise in advance for have you pass through this words) misery, intolerance or rigidity, fear, stagnant, sameless, vengeance, hate,… and failure.
So the trick, as you say, isn’t to see and feel failure (or success) exclusively in mainstream (negative) terms or as a form of punishment, rejection, unsuitable, guilt, be less… if not, enrich, improve, and empower our beliefs.
Thank You and Lisa for share that other secret with us.
Marcos
PS Odds… but my Site is still under construction. I’m searching for a good WordPress theme now. I’m going to read and watch Lisa about Thesis.
Hi Brian,
Here is a saying I learned a long time ago…
People don’t plan to fail, but they fail because of a lack of planning.
“TrafficColeman “Signing Off”
true – failure is a necessary ingredient of the success formula. if it wasn’t, all successful people would just be darn lucky
Quote from Charles F. Kettering — One fails forward toward success.
We can only learn from our failures, making it a learning experience. With failure comes knowledge and growth.
Great post Brian. Life is literally filled with successes and failures. It is important to learn from failure and transform weaknesses into strengths. Even champions experience failure. For example, the Los Angeles Lakers are the NBA champions but they did not win every game in the NBA season; they won the Larry O’Brien Championship trophy by winning more basketball games than they lost. The key to success, in my opinion, is to succeed more than you fail.
I wonder then, does anyone else agree that our greatest “weakness” is an inability or inattention to defining success?
I think the point I was hoping to make with the post is that we must be careful about fixating on a narrow definition of success and subsequently defining its absence as failure.
For example, I was making eggs and toast this morning. I kept running back to the computer when I heard e-mails coming in.
I prepare eggs and toast in a specific order so that they are preferably ready together. But I let the pan get hot before I put the toast in the toaster so the eggs were done too early. That was ok. I left them in the cooling pan while I made toast.
I could have been upset that I “failed” to make my breakfast the way I usually do. And I didn’t learn anything of great importance by this failure except that there’s more than one way to skin a … an egg.
Even if you “fail” more than you “succeed,” whatever those terms mean to you, a happy life has much more to do with how you view the events, not their outcome.
Thanks Brian and Lisa! As always you share great valuable and empowering information with us, showing how much you care for your readers.
Keep up the great job!
Many people are afraid of failure, but how else do we learn the right way and wrong way to do things?
After we fail, we have one more thing to offer to others- our acquired knowledge.
We need to share our failures as well as successes.
This is a great post.
Most people don’t realise that learning what does not work is just as important as knowing what does work.
When scientitsts do experiments, every result is important even the ‘failures’.
And when you’re embarking on a new path, every step is an experiment.
Failure is simply not getting the result you expected for a given action.
That may be initially disappointing but why dwell on that?
You’ve successfully isolated one path that won’t get you to your goal!
IMO, the fundamental difference between between successful people and those who don’t reach their goals is that the former were willing to endure more failures.
Sure, successful people seem to have it all figured out now that they’re on top of their fields and have gained respect.
But nobody knew or cared about them when they were struggling to get where they wanted to be.
We only see the finished product!
The problem is that too many people view failure as an attack on their self-worth.
If they do not get the expected results they think they’re not good enough or not smart enough.
They give up because they take failure personally and the dagger thrusts take too much of an emotional toll to be endured indefinitely.
This is not helped by the fact that the media and advertising plays on this failure aversion for its own purposes.
“Don’t be a loser: buy this instant money in a box internet cash dispenser”.
IMO, it’s important to divorce failure from any estimation of your value as a person and view it as a necessary part of the learning process.
Think of anything that you have never done before that you did perfectly the first time? I bet that’s not a long list.
Learning is all about action and reaction; it is about force and feedback.
When your dog is trying to get out does it care that it failed for an hour before getting its way?
However, we human beings are a lot more vain and judgemental of ourselves and others.
So yes, this post really touched a nerve with me because fear of failure results in a kind of paralysis that causes life to flutter away in a haze of hapless discontent.
I have been guilty of it as well; it’s partially the reason that I didn’t start my online business five years ago.
While I like the original poster’s seesaw analogy, one of my favourite sayings is a bit more direct:
Failure is Success in the making!
Do it!
Yes, failure is an event, not a person. And even as an event, it’s open to interpretation. Again I ask, where is the sharp dividing line between success and failure? There isn’t one except in certain circumstances (life and death decisions?).
I also wanted to thank Lisa once again for her website, her generosity, her insights, and for letting me guest blog.
Hi Brian,
Since I love to wax philosophical, I really enjoyed your article. You not only had what I felt were many strong ideas and evergreen life concepts, but it was well-written as well. I felt that I could envision the day you were experiencing from your description. Thank you:)
Right now, I am going through what is undoubtedly the worst time of my life thus far. It is that bad. I get upset and ask my questions of God or the Universe or whomever else any of us believes is helping the flow of events on this planet. In the end though, in hindsight, I have found that things really do tend to work out eventually, and that though we may not always have the privilege of this insight, after certain things have been said and done, I have been able to see that there really was a reason for everything- even the worst experiences. That doesn’t make things easier or less painful to go through, nor does it justify the unnecessary and cruel things people do to one another, but it does in quieter moments help give me something to hold onto.
Thanks once again for a thought-provoking piece, Brian.
Thank you, Tracy. I hope you find solace and a smoother road ahead. I have to say that 2009 was undoubtedly the worst year of my life in specific ways: loss of a job after 15 years, loss of a relationship, loss of a beloved sister to cancer.
There were times when I didn’t think I was going to get through last year with any sanity left but I did. And this year I’m thriving in a new career.
But you know what? I don’t see either end of that spectrum any more as having more meaning or being more reliable than the other. Neither success or failure are permanent conditions. Within our success we’ll continue to fail at things. Within our failures, we’ll continue to succeed at things.
It’s the weight we give these things in our minds that tortures or pleases us.
I hope I can call this to mind the next time I’m dreading taking a step or uncertain of my choice. Even if I fail, I’ll learn something valuable.
Failure Breeds Success.
Sam,
Or we might say, “Our reaction to failure breeds the potential for success.”
We learn all kinds of things from events that we don’t label as failure. I think I would almost rather say, “An awareness of success breeds success.”
The degree to which we can be aware of what we have right now, in this moment, and label that as success, is the degree to which we can place value in every day.
Failure, in my opinion is when we refuse to TRY again ! I believe everyone will fail at least once in their life, its just that you actually put in even more effort than the previous attempt that made you successful. As I continue to grow my business, I know I will run into problems and issues that may have me questioning my success and whether or not I’m actually doing well.
Putting in effort without having to be motivated is what keeps me going and helping me stay focused on succeeding. I don’t think about failure because its not what I’m trying to achieve! Only success.
Sam, think about the house story above. It’s not the problems and issues that make us question how we’re doing. It is internalized rules about success and failure. If we see both as just part of one continuum of action in life, neither one should be trusted or feared completely.
I understand the concept of learning from our failures, but we can make some smart decisions in order to limit them.
My father always said, “You don’t have to get kicked in the head to know it hurts.”
I think by reading blogs like this one, you can effectively eliminate numerous mistakes by learning from others. That is one very powerful way to court failure.
Thanks, Dave. None of us likes getting kicked in the head, that’s for sure. But the point I’m really trying to make with all of this is that “failure” is a perspective. It’s really an emotional reaction to an event, not the event itself.
There’s an old story about the reaction of three people whose house burns down.
1. Devastated by the loss of home and memories.
2. Stressed but extremely thankful that family is safe.
3. Glad that insurance will pay for a house that wouldn’t sell.
Assume that in all three cases, the event was exactly the same. It’s not the event that causes the distress; it’s how the event is viewed.
Great Article! I think that your advice should be taken by everyone. I’ll lend my own take on the subject matter…
Failure is just about guaranteed for us all. No matter the personality, background, or ethnicity we all want to win, we never want to fail.
This creates a fear in us that can lead to under-compensating into a mode of procrastination – keeping us free of the dreaded event, failure. But in reality, procrastination alone is a symbol of failure, because with it, you fail to act.
Regardless of the endeavor, action is required; without action, nothing can progress. I believe that we all have an internal defensive mechanism that works to protect us from the negative effects of our own actions, which can be failure. These defensive mechanism flourish into excuses; the primer for procrastination or inaction.
Everyone who’s achieved any form of success has faced failures along their journey…the difference between them and others [who aren’t as successful] is that they’ve learned the art of failing-early and getting over it.
Failing early is a concept which basically describes not focusing on failure as a crutch, but as a learning tool. The quicker you fail, the quicker you overcome and reach your goal. If you fail, you learn a very critical function of what not to do in the future, and hopefully an alternative method on how to advance.
Don’t allow the fear of failure to keep you from action, for this is failure in itself. You’re better off giving it your all and if you happen to fail, learn from the failure and then recover from it. Get started as quickly as possible so that you can overcome and achieve your goal as quickly as possible.
Peace to all!
Thanks, JK. I think there is something to practicing cognitive behavioral psychology when it comes to failure. As I asked above, where does failure lie? Where is the line that separates success from failure. All of our successes are mixed with elements of failure in their execution but if we define an event or episode as success, we ignore the parts that didn’t turn out as planned.
Henry Ford said, “Those who never make mistakes work for those who do.”
Oh, good one. Thanks, Fred.
This really resonates with me. Like it or not, it’s those ‘failures’ in our lives that tend to have the most valuable feedback for both business and personal growth. Our failures are really just learning experiences–we’re the ones who decide that they’re ‘bad’ or something to be embarrassed about.
Love your focus on living in the moment too. That’s a practice of mine, and as with all practices, there’s no such thing as ‘perfect.’ Overall though, staying in the here-and-now and not letting my thoughts roam all over the range has had a tremendously positive impact on all areas of my life.
Thanks, Jean.
Living in the moment is a difficult practice that never gets prefected, in my experience. But it does provide a clarity and enjoyment of the “now” that is such a different experience than being lost in your head with a million distractions (something I know plenty about too).
I like the way you characterize it: “Success is not the opposite of failure; it’s merely the other end of the see-saw.” We obviously learn from our failures, but we fare well when we learn from the failures of others.
Thanks, Wayne. When you think about it, where is the line between success and failure? It’s completely arbitrary and can be moved by changing one’s perspective of any aspect of an event. So when I say “see-saw” I’m really referring to a continuum that has no well-defined lines on it.