Did you catch the Superbowl last weekend? In order of importance, Usher still absolutely rocks at 45, Taylor Swift arrived on time, and the Kansas City Chiefs came from behind to win in overtime.
Podium speeches and endless game analysis happened long after my bedtime, but you know those who stayed up would have heard at least one athlete or sportscaster declare: “KC won it by adapting, changing their strategy.” “Mahomes (KC’s winning QB) has been here before,” and “KC knows how to win.”
You might have also caught a whispered, “Young Brock Purdy (49ers’ losing QB —don’t you love the jargon?) is devastated, but don’t worry, he’ll be back next year.”
Although we’ve heard these clichés a thousand times, our abilities, yours and mine, to re-educate and re-equip ourselves relentlessly for the future that’s headed our way, are perfectly encapsulated in this game and its enduring bromides.
KC did win because they changed their failed play selection of the first half, and Mahomes’ ability to learn from a career of winning, and losing, provided him with valuable knowledge and resilience. The unknown is whether Purdy will see his failure this time as a near-win learning experience, or a shattering, character-defining personal collapse.
Sport is but one example of how embracing failure is critical to our long-term success and ultimately happiness.
Elizabeth Gilbert struggled with years of writing failure before achieving tremendous success when her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, sold 10 million copies. She is adamant that those years of failure provided her with an intimate understanding of the dangers success carries, and how to cope with failure. She knew that her follow-up book was almost guaranteed to fail—the success of Eat, Pray, Love would be incredibly hard to replicate.
She contemplated not writing again, but understood, “If I had given up writing, I’d have lost my beloved vocation. So I knew that the task was to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book, regardless of its inevitable negative outcome. I had to find a way to make sure my creativity survived.”
Success can be fraught with pitfalls. It may cause us to resist new ideas and change, becoming rigid or even lazy, wanting to keep doing what we know worked before. Sticking with a winning formula and languishing in the confirmation biases of today may spurn creativity in the future. If success came relatively easily, our goals may have been set too low, and we may have never had our resilience or resourcefulness severely tested. If success includes celebrity, then narcissism and loss of humility and empathy may result.
Which do we need to adjust, our goal or our approach?
The idea that success can be limiting seems counter-intuitive, but there are degrees of success, and then there’s mastery. To achieve these higher levels, we must recognize that our ability to pursue our passion and creativity, to continue striving, is more important to us personally than maintaining the success we enjoy now.
This is only possible when we embrace the risk of failure, seeing it as challenge and motivation rather than an obstacle. Amelia Earhart defined the importance of pursuing one’s passion to the end when she so clearly stated, “I want to do it because I want to do it.” The weight of succeeding or failing was insignificant to her in that moment.
Although the books, self-help videos, motivational websites, etc., devoted to teaching us how to succeed far outnumber those that explain how to deal with failure, learning how to benefit from failing is equally important. In fact, many of the traits required for success are nurtured while dealing with failure.
Failure can spur outside-the-box thinking, creativity and motivation, all required to successfully move forward with problem-solving solutions. Learning how to deal with failure keeps our thought processes flexible and nimble.
Failure keeps us humble, and makes us more empathetic toward others who fail.
Failure helps us identify our strengths and weakness, and provides insight into our true limits and full potential. Which do we need to adjust, our goal or our approach?
Successfully finding benefit in failure is not easy. We have to accept that failure is part of the process, a teachable moment. What did I learn from that, what positive can I take away?
Investigating why we failed helps us recognize that we may have made a bad choice or misinterpreted evidence, but that we are not weak or mentally incompetent. We have to divorce our emotions from the analytical process of examining our failures. Accepting responsibility without self-recrimination is a first step to adopting the mindset required to benefit from failure.
Bruce Mau, the acclaimed and sometimes confusing Canadian designer who wrote Massive Change and produced a parallel immersive art exhibition, coined the phrase “Madonna Curve.” Mau contends success is an arc that we travel, ascending the curve as our successes increase, reaching the crown at our pinnacle, then sliding away as success fades. He sees Madonna as the perfect example of how understanding failure propels even greater success. Why did she stay at the top of her, and the entertainment industry’s game, for so long when most fade away?
Mau claims that Madonna followed the curve (arc) of her success continuously, and instinctively knew when she was about to slide from its crown. That’s precisely when she would make the leap, repeatedly re-inventing her persona, her songs and her style. It was seeing failure on the horizon, and benefiting from that knowledge, that motivated her to even greater heights.
When we truly believe that the benefits of failure are an integral part of success, we become free to pursue our passions without fear.
