Quick Tip: The Upside of Failure

If you’ve ever read a memoir or read or watched any kind of motivational talk, like a graduation speech, you’ve likely seen people portray failure as a key to their success. 

Yet for a lot of us failure is something that we avoid at all costs. 

In fact, fear of failure can become paralyzing, preventing us from taking calculated risks that may work out in our favor or even from trying new things. It can also contribute to perfectionism, stress, and anxiety as well as overworking and overanalyzing.

But just like those motivational speakers say, failure is not always a bad thing, and it is something that many of us will encounter throughout our lives if we haven’t already. 

In that sense, developing a healthy relationship with the concept of failure can be helpful because if we can start to see it as part of the process and not as a mark on our character, then we’re more likely to accept the times when we fail and learn from them.

Which is where the potential value of failure comes in. 

The Upsides

For example, one potential benefit of failure, or not getting an intended result, is that it can show us our blind spots, or things that we weren’t able to see when we so focused on a particular outcome.

This might look like working really hard toward a particular goal, like landing a job in a specific field that’s really competitive while not recognizing that we actually don’t like the work. Maybe it’s not fulfilling or it doesn’t really play to our strengths but we keep working toward that goal because that’s all we can see and we don’t want to fail. 

If we can zoom out though and really contemplate what’s going on we might see that not getting the intended result is actually to our benefit because it’s showing us that there could be something better out there for us.

A second potential benefit of failing is that it can increase our sense of resilience. 

Not getting the result we want, while humbling, can also be an indication that maybe we have to change our strategy or maybe we didn’t put forth as much effort as we thought or that we could have. 

Trying again at something that maybe didn’t go the way you wanted it to the first, or even sometimes the second or third time, can help to build grit and determination but also build your confidence. 

Take Michael Jordan, who didn’t make his high school varsity basketball team on the first try, and on his mom’s advice decided to practice harder and later not only made the team but went on to become one of the most successful and celebrated basketball players of all time. 

Michael Jordan talks a lot about failing and is open about how many times he failed throughout the course of his career and how it helped him, but that’s not what most people know him for. I bet when you think of Michael Jordan, you think of his passion for basketball or athletics, the games he played, the shots he took, or maybe the time he took a risk and started playing baseball. 

Point being: We don’t typically remember people purely because of their “failures” but rather for the arc of their story—the times when they might have failed but kept showing up anyway as well as the times they won.

Somewhat related to this idea is a third potential benefit of failure and that is that it can show you your inherent self-worth.

Coming back from failure or not getting what we want usually requires digging pretty deep. We have to be able to separate the situation from who we are as a person, in other words not taking the failure personally, which can be really difficult to do. 

It’s easy to feel bad about ourselves or think that there’s something wrong with us when we don’t get an outcome that we want. 

But truly, there are often so many variables at play when we’re working toward a goal, and we can’t always control them all, for better or worse. 

Not getting an intended result has nothing to do with our inherent value as a person. It might mean you have try harder. It might mean you have to change up your strategy, but who you are as a person doesn’t change. 

And the more we can detach from taking failure personally, the more resilient we become and the strong our sense of self-esteem and self-confidence because we’re not letting outcomes determine what we are capable of achieving or worthy of experiencing.

To go a little bit deeper on this topic, here are a couple of questions to ponder on your own:

• Based on your life experience so far, how would you define failure? 

• And on the flipside, how would you define success?

*Disclaimer: The information contained in this episode is for the sole purpose of being informative and is not considered complete. It should not replace consultation with a qualified professional.