I learned how to embrace failure
Note: This is a summary of a podcast episode. Prefer to listen? Check it out here.
When you’re forging your own path in your career, especially one in a creative field, failure is a normal part of the process. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt really fucking bad.
In moments of failure, it’s easy to be self-critical, to get pessimistic, or even to give up altogether.
As someone who has historically placed way too much of my personal identity in my career achievements, failure can often lead to an identity crisis of sorts. If you fail, it feels like this crucial part of who you are suddenly isn’t functioning.
But as someone who I think could be considered a professional fail-er, I’ve realized that failure is not only normal, but actually a really valuable part of the creative process. Or your career-building experience.
First of all: everyone fails
If you’re not failing, you’re probably not pushing yourself hard enough, in all honesty. No one is going to be great at anything meaningful all the time.
Failing is normal. In fact, they say that the average successful person fails 16% of the time. And it makes sense. When you’re trying to do something really cool and really new, if it was easy, someone else probably would have done it before.
Think about some of the most famous successful people.
Steve Jobs? Kicked out of his company.
Thomas Edison, the man who invented the light bulb? He was famous for failing again and again.
Michael Jordan? He was cut from his high school basketball team and popularly claimed that he missed more than 9,000 shots in his career.
Their failures didn’t stop them from becoming the best. It helped them hone their craft. The people who truly succeed don’t have a lower rate of failure, they just try things so many more times that their failures become negligible in the grand scheme of things.
How are you defining failure?
Before we dive any deeper into this topic of failure, we first need to talk about how you’re defining failure.
Failure or iteration?
What is iteration if not failing over and over again on purpose? But for some reason, we view iteration as a strategic part of the design process — rapid prototyping, learning, redoing — but we view failure as an indicator of some massive flaw.
Starting to think of failure as just one step in an iterative learning process has helped me view failure completely differently.
In the book, Creative Confidence (essentially my creativity bible at this point), they shared this story of an experimental format that had for one pottery class: Half of the class was tasked with creating the highest quality project, while the other half was tasked with creating the most projects possible.
At the end of the class, the people who set out with the goal of creating as much as possible ended up creating, as a whole, much better, more creative pieces than the people who were trying to create the “perfect” piece.
This, to me, demonstrates this failure vs. iteration mindset perfectly. The people who were rapidly, and maybe messily, trying a million different things let go of this fear of “failing” because the assignment removed the pressure. This gave them permission to iterate and fail.
Failure for who?
I’ve been diving really deeply into design thinking over the last several months, and one of the things that really stuck out to is the narrow way that a lot of us naturally look at success.
It very well may be that what we’re viewing as a “failure” could be a success if framed differently. It just takes an intentional shift of the mind to be open to accepting how else you could apply what you’ve created or learned.
For example, you could be working really hard to create a product for adults that isn’t turning out how you hoped, but it ends up being perfect for children. Or you want to create a movie to submit to a film festival and it’s flopping, but along the way, you’ve established a really great guide for storyboarding that you could share with other filmmakers.
In these cases, it’s not really a failure if you have solved a problem, even if it’s not the original one you set out to solve.
“Failure sucks, but instructs”
The best way to learn something is just by doing it. Very few people who are experts at their craft ever succeed in a big way immediately. It takes failing time and time again to build the muscles you need to succeed.
So as much as failure feels awful, it can actually be a valuable part of your creative process.
Just like you practice for sports, you need to “practice” in your creative career, and this involves a lot of failing. With every failure, you get to know your craft better. You learn what your weaknesses are, how they show up, and how to account for them. You get direct contact with the messier parts of the process that you can’t necessarily learn about in books or podcasts.
The higher threshold that you can have for failure, the deeper you can dive into become an expert. The harder things are, the more failure is required to really “get it.”
There’s that saying that if you fail 1000 times, it’s still 1000 wins, because you’ve crossed so many things off the list of potential solutions.
I love holding onto this concept when I feel especially discouraged by my moments of failure.
Sometimes, failure signals the need for a redirection
And there are a few ways this redirection can look.
First scenario: You’re repeatedly failing and not learning from it, and along the way realize that your heart isn’t fully in it. You just want to succeed for the sake of succeeding. The level of dedication needed to succeed is above your threshold for the goal at hand.
In these cases, which has happened to me time and time again, I take it as a sign.
For example, I had been running my interior design blog for a few years and ended up getting my interior design certification. The natural next step was to start taking on interior design clients.
But I just kept hitting roadblock after roadblock. I was doing everything I thought I should be doing, with very minimal results. So then I was faced with a decision: double down and step up or game, or give up. And once that decision was in front of me, it became very clear. I realized I really didn’t want to get interior design clients. I liked teaching about interior design on my blog much better.
There are probably many instances that you’ve experienced like this. Where failure wakes you up to the fact that you don’t care about something as much as you thought.
Second scenario: maybe you don’t need to fully redirect, may you just need to reframe the problem.
Another design thinking tenet that I’ve really latched onto lately is the idea that you can’t list the solution in the problem. Oftentimes, this is at the root of why you’re failing, because it sets your scope too narrow.
I’ll give you an example from a book that I read recently. It’s very simplistic, but I think does a good job of illustrating how this may look in practice.
Someone needed better light for their office so that they could work better, so they thought the problem was that they needed a better lamp to work by, or they needed to create a better light bulb. But see how they put the solution in the problem? If you zoom out a little more, you’ll realize that the actual problem is the lighting. So framing it this way opens you up to other possibilities, like rearranging their office to make the most of the natural light, or even changing their working house.
Here are some other examples that may resonate more with you:
A writer is experiencing writer’s block. They think the problem is that their writing process needs to be tweaked, but they just can’t identify the changes that work. But the real problem is broader: that they can’t write. And perhaps a more effective solution is that they start therapy or take medication to get their anxiety in check.
You have a brand-new clothing line. You’re trying to create a really solid marketing campaign, but campaign after campaign keeps failing. The problem you want to solve isn’t creating a good marketing campaign, it’s actually that your sales are low. So a better solution may be to connect with different suppliers who have relationships with large retailers that can get your line in stores.
Sometimes, you need to fail to make these redirections clear. Even experts have to do a good amount of guesswork when trying something that is new to them. So giving yourself the permission to fail can help you continuously dig deeper into the true nature of your problem or your goal.
Failing in the right way
Of course, you can’t just fail your way to success on accident. There is an art to leveraging failure in the right way.
Fail fast to help you get started
There’s a book called “Juggling for the Complete Klutz” that teaches beginners how to juggle. And they recommend getting failure out of the way at the very beginning. The first step in learning to juggle, for them, is to just throw all 3 balls in the air and let them drop.
Think of how you can apply this to your career. Think of what the worst kind of failure you can have, and get it out of the way quick. For juggling, it’s all of the balls hitting the floor. For those trying to become an influencer, maybe it’s that no one engages with your post at all. For painters, maybe it’s that you make a piece of art that is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. Looming failure is way worse that actually failing, so just allow yourself to rip the bandaid off. Create that terrible first draft, post with no expectations of engagement, get rejected by that first agent you pitch to.
Once you get this first failure out of the way, suddenly, you feel free to keep going because the pressure is gone.
Focus on the small successes
It can be really easy to get caught up in all of the failures along the way. Like I’ve said, you’re probably going to fail many times at anything worth succeeding at. The trick is to focus on the growth rather than the downfalls.
One study that demonstrates this really well is Bandura’s study on phobias, which proves the importance of self-efficacy. There was a group of people with intense fears of things like snakes or spiders. He led them through a series of baby steps that eventually led to them making direct contact with their biggest fears.
It may have started with just standing outside of a closed door with their fears on the other side, then standing in an open doorway, then standing in the room with them, and so on. What they found was this series of consecutive and growing small wins was able to cure people of their phobias in most cases.
There can be a lot of parallels drawn between this study and people who have doubts in their creative abilities or fear of failing. When you make progress, no matter how small and no matter how surrounded it was by other failures, you need to revel in it. This positive mindset gives you the confidence and the grit to keep going, fueled by all of the things you’ve learned in the process.
Let go of your maladaptive perfectionism
I recently read a book called The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control, and it made me realize 2 things.
It’s okay to be a perfectionist and it’s not worth fighting against it if it’s who you naturally are.
That being said, there is a big difference between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism. You want to avoid the latter.
I think there is a big overlap between perfectionism and fear of failure. If you’re using your perfectionism in a maladaptive way, you’re either getting paralyzed by your fear of failure or are setting such strict standards on everything that you do that you never allow yourself to accept that you did succeed. This rigid and stressful way of thinking ensures that you stay crippled by failure.
If you’re using your perfectionism in a constructive way, you’re using failures as educational tools to continuously strive to do better.
What I’ve gained since I’ve (actively worked at) letting go of my fear of failure
Letting go of a fear of failure is a continuous goal that you need to strive for. It’s something that I’m actively shaking off, but the more I do, the better I get at it.
I’m more excited to try new things
Being scared of failure may cause some people to niche down and only pursue things that they’re experts at. Letting go of this lets me experiment with my interests and makes me more open to being a beginner.
I learn better
I look at everything as an experiment. When I don’t let myself succumb to failure, I’m able to push aside some of the negative emotions associated with failure and lean into what I’m learning from it. And what I find is that the more I fail, the better I get at what I’m trying to do.
I have fewer regrets
It makes me sad to think how many people have robbed themselves of the opportunity to go after what they really want becuase they’re scared of failing. I personally would rather fall on my face and embarrass myself than live with the regret of not trying.
