Failure as a Feature.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were an expert at something, without needing the practice.

Wouldn’t it be convenient if everything we created, worked first time.

Wouldn’t life be easier if every decision we made, turned out to be the right one.

From musical instruments, to school, to cookery, to work, to sports, to love and to life itself.  Our existence would perhaps follow a smoother path than it has, if the five-thousandth time we did something went in the same fashion as the first.

But then again, doesn’t that sound boring?

Or worse, doesn’t it sound like a dangerous illusion?

But abject or dejected failure, seems to have fallen out of style, unless it is part of the jeopardy of a narrative that leads to eventual success over adversity.

No more so than in our work, the very place that many of us spend the majority of our time and that makes up a large part of our identity.

Nobody says: today sucked because nothing went right, and I don’t know what to do next.  Everything broke, and I don’t have the strength to fix it.  I spoke to no-one today, and I’m not sure who I’m going to speak to tomorrow.

Failure is something we don’t do. We don’t fail. We succeed. We grow. We are sometimes victims. We are often the underdog.  We are definitely angry.

It is not always like this.

We teach those who are starting on their first paths in life all the time, that nothing is easy.  We tell our children, or the children of our friends and family, that it is OK to stumble, and that practice is the way to get better.

We teach them that it is OK to be wrong.  We tell them they will miss the target a lot before they hit it. 

We tell them not to be afraid of failure.

So why then, do we forget to remind ourselves?

We cannot because we feel so much shame.  And it is shame that prevents us from speaking up, creating with freedom, sharing our unproven ideas, saying yes to things that frighten us, asking the question in the meeting, or trying something we’ve never done before when we are supposed to be too old to tread that path.

Once we realise shame and failure should not be connected, and call it out, then we can work together to change it.

Once we work together to delete the shame of failure from our communities, our organizations, our families, we can get back to the important things in life. 

Because when doing something important, there cannot be shame in failure. 

It is too useful.  Too interesting.  Too much of a gift.

In creative industries, it is so important to fail.  And in an idea-driven world, it is essential to fail to make things better.

There is toil.  But emotional toil, is part of important forward motion, and it is rarely with more success than failure.  And the emotion should not be shame.

Creating a culture without shame, does not mean failure is not recognised.  But it is a culture where failure is just the same as success. 

A thing that you do, and that you learn from.  A thing you recognize, celebrate, around the same tables, in the same communities.

Where instead of hiding failure, we try to quantify it, avoid it where we can, and embrace it where we cannot or we do not.

And what is more, in life – if you are trying to hold down a job, run a family, be a good friend, parent, sibling, partner, pet owner, [add or delete as appropriate to the endless list of life] then fitting all the expectations placed on our shoulders and into our days is impossible.

Unless we begin to realise we can’t do everything always to our own standards, and until we realise that failure is normal and real, experienced by everyone and more common than success — all of our mental health will continue to suffer.

It can cause us to give up on even the good things we do.

And worse, it is only so long, that we can stand to be the person who is simply trying to get through, spinning plates that are on fire.

Trying to not feel guilty at not being able to do the bombardment of things we are told we should be doing.

There is a point where we are ground down and we give up. The goal becomes so detached from reality that we end up going backwards, not forwards.

So let’s work together to make a world where the opposite is true.  A world where we try to fail by experimenting, speaking out, and putting our ideas into the world with no expectation of success.

Where we are the one that tries it first, fails, and encourages others to do the same.

A world where we realise how beautiful it is to fail, and how useful failure can be.