There may be no better representation of failure than when a project you’ve been working on spectacularly explodes in front of thousands of viewers. If SpaceX CEO Elon Musk does – as his company probably did in the end Starship prototype starts on Wednesday– The agony of failure is made tactile in towers of flames and clouds of burning splinters pouring around the world.
Musk is a billionaire, industrialist, and audacious public figure known for her resounding success in various industries. And yet he often fails, and occasionally even sees his ambitions to build rockets that will take people to Mars and literally go up in flames.
He’s not the only successful magnate or icon who occasionally wallows in the pits of failure. Thomas Edison is known for his recognition its close relationship with failure;; For years, JD Salinger’s literary genius was unsung because his short stories were repeatedly rejected by the New Yorker. Michael Jordan failed to make his high school college basketball team on the first try.
We don’t always need to be guided by the efforts of wealthy tycoons – especially those with Call as checkered as Musk’s– or from visionary inventors or legendary athletes. A lesson can be learned from the stumbling blocks that are overcome by both the hugely successful and the anonymous people. Failure haunts us all no matter how many triumphs we enjoy in the course of our lives. But failure can be instructive. There are often important lessons, if not glimmers of success, within our failures – consider the fact that this SpaceX rocket exploded before it exploded did something unprecedented– but appreciating this fact means rethinking the concept of what it means to fail.
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Failure is a constant so don’t stick with it
Well-known stereotypes about failure exist in context, but especially at work. The term “fail early and often” exists to encourage younger workers who are struggling to gain a foothold in their jobs. “Embrace of Failure” goes without saying for entrepreneurs who gamble in their early attempts to build something with perseverance. The suggestion is that your embrace of failure should be a temporary step toward an idealized idea of lasting success.
But things are seldom cut and dried that way in life. Success works well with others, according to Ross McCammon, the author of the guide to business etiquette. Success comes with failure more often than you might expect. However, as he puts it, this is actually a good thing – if failure can be interpreted as an actionable dilemma.
“Failure is not a dead thing,” he tells Lifehacker. “It’s a living thing and you can draw energy from it. But the longer you wait to think about it, the calcified it becomes. And then it’s just a big dead thing that happened, rather than an integral part of your present and future. ”
Taking a mindful approach is key to realizing how missteps can help you in the short and long term. McCammon emphasizes a more proactive approach, where you identify mistakes when they occur and discuss them honestly with colleagues and supervisors.
He says:
Recognizing success within a bug is best done immediately after realizing what happens as a bug. Or maybe even during. I think failing early and often failing works as a philosophy, as long as you also rate early and often and make your assessments known to your colleagues and even your boss.
Not everyone has the luxury of having such courteous workplaces and friendly, understanding bosses and colleagues. But you can avoid the black cloud of failure in your own mind by broadening your perspective on what it means to fail.
Accept that your career is not linear
“I’ve been fired from almost every job I had because of budgets or downsizing,” says Sean Abrams, editor of the Ask Men website. As a 29-year-old millennial writer, Abrams is no stranger to the upheaval in the digital media industry, entirely not to mention the changes that have permeated the wider labor market since the 2008 Great Recession. For those in his position, failure often stems from circumstances beyond their control – recognition of which can provide valuable prospect.
“Sometimes the factors that led to your failure have little to do with you at all. You just got the short end of the stick, ”Abrams says.
Marking an unsuccessful business as a failure is too reducing to have much educational value. McCammon suggests “rejecting the idea of stages like failure and success and playing a longer game” in which we accept that the arcs of our careers will be anything but predictable.
He says to Lifehacker:
As we move through our career, we first think of it as a line of sorts and a line that should rise at all times. Of course that doesn’t happen. It doesn’t always go up and sometimes it goes sideways and drags itself over itself. Maybe you tried a new career for a few years, maybe you were unemployed for a while. Careers are not linear. And I think that’s a helpful context for judging mistakes.
One way to redefine failure, especially in a culture that overly lionizes the successful, is to be less strict about them. Instead, think of setbacks as educational mistakes rather than dealing with the drastic consequences of a perceived failure. Errors are normal and excusable and occur regularly. People who make mistakes aren’t usually defined by them – and McCammon says you should own yours without an excuse:
“What any successful person – young or old – is good at is making mistakes with no excuses … you could argue that a career is just a series of mistakes that you navigate and turn into successes.”
With that in mind, it won’t be difficult at all to succeed within your alleged faults.
