Fail Brilliantly: Exploding the Myths of Failure and Success

Copyright © 2017 by Shelley Davidow and Paul Williams

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Published by Familius LLC, www.familius.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

2017941394

Print ISBN 9781945547256

Ebook ISBN 9781945547614

Printed in the United States of America

Edited by Katharine Hale

Cover design by David Miles

Book design by Brooke Jorden

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

If you’ve ever felt like a failure, this book is for you.

Contents

From Blunders to Catastrophes:

Our Prehistoric Ancestors and the Neurobiology of Failure

First-Degree Failures:

Second-Degree Failures:

Third-Degree Failures and Their Arbitrary Nature

Famous and Successful People—and the Myth of Failure

Most People Are Failures

The Language of Failure

Changing the Narrative of Failure

Philosophies of Failure

Transformative Thinking:

Living with Unexpected Outcomes

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

—Thomas Edison

"Failure is just another name for much of real life."

—Margaret Atwood

There are scads of self-help books on how to succeed, but I’ve never come across a single one on how to contend with not succeeding—which is more the form for practically everybody, right?

—Lionel Shriver

Introduction

From Blunders to Catastrophes:

The Unexpected Outcome as a Force That Shapes Us

Despite your best efforts and learning from past failures, you have failed to become the success you dreamt of being. You have pasted Never Give Up signs on your bathroom mirror, and you feel you have been at it 24/7 since you were at school. But after bad luck and a series of unanticipated disasters in this competitive world, you realise that there is the very real possibility that this is it. The successful life you have imagined for yourself may never materialise.

So now what?

We live in a binary world of success and failure. Many of us wouldn’t just think of ourselves as on the road—living through and facing adversity and making the best of what comes to us. We most often think of ourselves as either successes or as failures. But we’re caught in an illusion. We’re not on a journey to a single successful destination. We’re just on a journey, though we’re taught every day by society to measure our lives against our expectations and the expectations of others. And much of this causes us pain—from the time we set foot in a school classroom, to the time we don’t get the job we interviewed for, to the time we lose all our money on a tumbling stock market. We spend time beating ourselves up about poor decisions, about not succeeding, and we transfer that to our colleagues, our partners, our children.

Our mammal brains drive us towards the taste of success. Our so-called failures can paralyse us because we are wired to avoid things that cause disappointment. Though bloggers and psychologists rave on about the gifts of failure, it is still essentially a societal negative. The world frowns on us getting things wrong. We are constantly graded and branded according to the evidence of our successes: academic achievement, social standing, the cars we drive, how much money we make.

Yet the fabric of failure is an intricate and essential aspect of our existence.

Big failures often result in side events that aren’t measurable: transformation, shifts in perspective and values—even if the goals themselves are never reached. From doomed explorers to aborted moon landings to novels that were rejected a dozen times, this book looks at failure as an integral part of human existence and dissolves many of the illusions surrounding failure that we have come to believe. It reveals a new approach to contending with all kinds of failures.

Degrees of Failure

One significant problem we face is that we use failure as a blanket term, which can be very confusing because not all failures are created equal. When we talk about failure these days, we lump everything together as if a failed test or business venture has the same value or impact as a failed medical intervention or the failure of an aircraft to arrive at its destination.

So for the purpose of clarity, we have divided failure into three broad categories, which allows us to look at these so-called failures in new ways.

First-Degree Failures . . .

are the most devastating. These are the failures that result in total disasters and loss of life—for example: planes that fail to make it to their destinations; medical errors that result in someone dying or being irrevocably harmed; failure of an emergency service to arrive on time, resulting in disaster; failure of justice, resulting in the wrong person being convicted of a crime.

These failures have irredeemable results. People die; things are damaged beyond repair. We can hardly celebrate these failures or commend the people involved as having failed brilliantly. If we learn anything from them, it is that, at all costs, we want to prevent similar failures from happening ever again.

Second-Degree Failures . . .

are those where a significant goal is set but not met. For example, the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, which was aborted but did not result in any loss of life, or Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–1916 doomed voyage across Antarctica—all twenty-eight men on the journey lived, though they lost everything and never achieved their goal of crossing the continent. These second-degree failures are the adventurous or scientific journeys where one outcome is expected but another unforeseen one occurs; they are the failures of artists and researchers and writers and anyone trying to create something that has not been created before.

These failures, unlike first-degree failures, often spawn unexpected innovations, collaborations, and new ideas and lead to personal growth, development, hidden benefits, and lessons of a kind that only surviving the harshest circumstances can. These failures are commendable as having intrinsic value, as being catalysts for transformation, as bringing new and valuable knowledge to the world. They are worth celebrating. In fact, these failures should not even be termed failures, because they bypass all the word’s carefully constructed definitions.

Third-Degree Failures . . .

are the ones we decide are failures. They are distinctly subjective, and our responses to them have as much to do with biology and physiology as with the actual failure itself. They are the failed tests, the failure to get into the university course of our choice, the failure to make enough money, or create a successful business, or be a successful writer, or meet specific targets set by our bosses or ourselves. These failures often make us feel terrible about ourselves. We are frequently unable to separate ourselves and our own value from these failures.

These failures have parameters that are randomly imposed by us, and the line dividing a so-called pass or success from failure is drawn whimsically wherever we think to draw it. When we set ourselves goals—personal, financial, academic—we unconsciously create a system of potential failures, and so it’s best to understand the risk inherent in aiming for success.

Malcolm Gladwell thoroughly points out in his book Outliers that the people, the athletes, the social entrepreneurs, the businessmen who succeed in terms of our material definitions of success in the world do work hard—but in every case he examines, there exists a lucky break, a chance meeting that led to that hard work paying off. And he demonstrates how there are those geniuses who never got the lucky break, still living their unremarkable lives despite their brilliance and hard work. Their incredible ideas and creations never saw the light of day or resulted in material success. It’s a fact: bad luck and twists of fate have prevented many talented human beings from being rewarded for their efforts, either financially or in terms of recognition.² Most of us can probably identify with that to some degree.

There is an element of chance in every so-called success, and those of us who believe that we can achieve anything if we set our minds to it need to understand that life is full of surprises that may make our journey’s outcome entirely unexpected. So what do those of us do who have put in our ten thousand hours towards achieving our goal and are not adequately rewarded for our efforts?

Dealing with these failures requires a complete rethink of the concept of failure—and, of course, the concept of success.

Life is failure. Our entire four-billion-year journey through the universe is made up of all kinds of trials and errors. Our lives are full of stumbles and falls and unexpected outcomes which often do not lead to success of any kind.

We believe failure falls broadly into three categories. In this book, we explore how these play out in the world, examine the impact of failure on our own lives, and show how we can separate ourselves from a concept that causes unnecessary pain by providing readers with revolutionary ways of thinking about failure.

Notes

1. Yactayo-Changa, Jessica P., Sangwoong Yoon, Keat Thomas Teoh, Nathan C. Hood, Argelia Lorence, and Elizabeth E. Hood. Failure to over-express expansion in multiple heterologous systems. New Negatives in Plant Science 3–4, August–December (2016): 10–18. Accessed March 16, 2017. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352026416300022.

2. Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.

Chapter One

Our Prehistoric Ancestors and the Neurobiology of Failure

When we think of success and failure, we are usually confined to a very specific arena: that of human endeavour to get to the top of the pile or, more plainly, to survive. Anything linked to our survival results in us experiencing the feel-good effects of serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin. Anything that poses a threat to our survival gets us feeling stressed, depressed, and unhappy and results eventually in low self-esteem. We want to survive. We want to thrive. In fact, we are the offspring of generations of people who were savvy enough to survive. ¹

Imagine a prehistoric ancestor wandering through the African savanna. For days, he hasn’t eaten. He’s been hunting a wounded antelope that he shot with his arrow, following its footprints. He’s tired, he’s starving, he’s thirsty, and he is at least a whole day’s walk from home. His children and their mother are hungry, and he really cannot do this much longer. But he persists. Suddenly, he comes upon the animal in a clearing. He is euphoric. Now he knows he and his family will have plenty to eat for the next few days. His hard work of tracking and persevering has paid off. He feels important, successful, relieved.

Our circumstances have changed and our brains have evolved over thousands of years, but essential characteristics remain almost identical to those of our prehistoric ancestors. In the modern world, that ancestor’s offspring is a real estate agent. For months, she hasn’t sold anything. A potential buyer for a million-dollar home in the area has been interested but not committed. For weeks, she has been showing and reshowing the house, getting information to the buyers, keeping calm when they made unreasonable requests, calling them up when their interest seemed to have waned. And then, finally, they arrive one day with their cash offer. They close the deal on the house, and she can hardly believe it. Just like her prehistoric ancestor who found food after days of hunger, she is euphoric. Her family will eat. She can get her car fixed. She can go on holiday and even visit her ailing parents overseas. She feels completely successful. She will survive!

Our brains are finely tuned for success, only now we equate good grades, money, and having lots of stuff with survival. To some degree, that is true: we’re no longer wandering the plains hunting for food and sleeping in caves. We need a certain amount of money to put a roof over our heads and food on the table, but we raise the bar higher and higher, feeling deserving of more and more and better and better. We set ourselves up for feeling like failures when we don’t keep climbing the ladder of material success, of having bigger houses, new cars, and more and more stuff. And then, from the minute our kids begin to breathe, we put pressure on them to achieve, to constantly move up the ladder we’ve created as we tick off the list of academic achievements. Without even knowing it, we tie those achievements to survival: getting an A on a spelling test in primary school begins to carry the weight of survival. It becomes a life-or-death stress for us and for our children. We believe somehow that this will be a predictor of whether they survive or not in the world.

The Effects of Failure on Animals

According to neurobiologist and author Loretta Graziano Breuning, the majority of animals suffer less from disappointment than humans do because they don’t live with the expectations that things should be different.² Let’s say you’re a mongoose and a predator eats your baby. You will of course be heartbroken, you may be sad and stressed and afraid of those predators, but you won’t develop elaborate theories of self-doubt or hatred because you failed to protect your young. As humans, our self-doubt and theories of failure in the world are added stressors that make life miserable for many.

We have a unique capacity to imagine others’ suffering and to live into it. Mirror neurons allow us to feel the pain of other living creatures experiencing pain. Because of empathy with fellow humans and other living things, many of us like to imagine a more peaceful world. We can picture a world where we don’t drop bombs on each other or each other’s children . . . we have seen the good traits in so many people that we have the basis for hoping or even expecting that people will behave in a civilised, ethical manner—not grab each other’s stuff, countries, oil, or gold. When that doesn’t happen, when our expectations of how things should be are thwarted, we are devastated. When we expect our kids to pass their driving test and they don’t, we might feel we’ve failed as parents or our children have failed. There are plenty of parents who treat kids’ soccer as a life-or-death game where winning is tied closely to the self-esteem of both kids and their parents. And if their kids lose, those parents make them feel like failures. In fact, the moms and dads themselves go on to feel like failures.

But this is a system we have invented.

Those parents have tied their ancient survival instincts to a child playing a soccer game, therefore failing to win results in enormous distress that is not equal to its reality.

Other mammals have many problems—they suffer, they may be stressed—but they do not have an elaborate process for creating self-doubt. Breuning expands on this in her book Habits of a Happy Brain with a quote that might serve us well in many circumstances in life:

When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn’t expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed. Humans use their extra neurons to construct theories about bananas and end up constructing pain.³

Losing one banana is no big deal. But