“Forget that failure is even possible.” – Steve Sims (Bluefishing)
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
When you think of “success”, I assume what comes to mind isn’t near national tragedy with a potential death toll in the thousands. And yet, there’s the story of Hartford, Connecticut’s XL Center – home UConn Huskies’ basketball and ice hokey, as well as a former host to NBA and NHL teams.
On January 17, 1978, the arena then known as the Hartford Civic Center played host to a Tuesday night men’s basketball game between the University of Connecticut and University of Massachusetts. UConn upset UMass in front of a raucous hometown crowd. Just six hours later, the roof of the building catastrophically collapsed due to engineering failures that miscalculated the pressures of heavy snow. Thus, the largest tragedy in Connecticut’s history was narrowly avoided by a stroke of luck.
While the vast majority of your failures are likely to be much lower stakes than the safety of a building design, relatively speaking they may be no less emotionally devastating to you. But for the most part, I’m going to advocate that you take the two quotes at the top of this article to heart and practice. Let’s cover why, and how.
The negative connotation to failure is often based on perception.
That means failure is regularly a relative measurement in both how you reach it and in how you react to it. For you to have failed at anything, success must be clearly defined and unmovable. Your thought pattern and emotional response is also often up to choice as well.
In some cases, that measurement of failure is objective (you shouldn’t murder, you shouldn’t steal, etc.) The ground I want to cover is our own subjective measurements – ie: we’re horrible humans because we should’ve worked out, eaten better, set an alarm, networked, made a demo reel, pushed your career forward, etc.
Subjective measurements are entirely self-defined in measurement and reaction. Therefore, they’re the best learning sandbox you can ever give yourself.
You may be familiar with the story that Edison failed 1,000 times before creating a successful lightbulb. In this “what constitutes a lightbulb” is clearly defined to Edison, but may have a slightly different meaning to anyone else (ie: something that electrically emits light, using different materials or a different way). With this definition, Edison really did fail countless times, but he also had the choice as to how he thought about and reacted to his failure.
Clearly, Edison didn’t wallow too long in self-pity and think about how awful of an electrical engineer or inventor he was. He likely got frustrated and angry, but he availed himself the opportunity to learn from his mistakes and try again. His emotions followed his thoughts here, and his thought pattern didn’t fail him.
You can quite literally apply this same technique to anything you decide to throw in your learning sandbox, be it making more interesting music and sounds, learning social media, networking, interviewing, resume writing, or entrepreneurship. For subjective measurements we can easily say “there is no failure”, there’s just lots of learning to be had.
Failure isn’t necessarily no.
When we enter into our learning sandboxes, we often come in with our egos on fire.
“I GOT THIS!” you think to yourself, as you get metaphorical sand all over yourself trying to knock a resume, cover letter, and interview out of the park. Or maybe you put out a big scary social media post, or DM’ed someone you’d really like to connect with.
…and then crickets.
Your trained inclination here is to think something is wrong with you, or you didn’t do well enough. While there’s a small statistical chance you’re correct, there’s actually a huge probability that you’re wrong and that it has nothing to do with you at all.
Thus, what you perceive as “no” can often mean “not yet”.
Two quick personal examples of this – I’ve worked at both 343 Industries and Bungie game studios in my career. Both companies turned me down first before eventually hiring me.
In 343’s case, various circumstances out of my and the hiring manager’s control seemed to indicate that a deal couldn’t be made. I was incredibly bummed at the time because I thought that meant my career in games was over before it had really even started. A few months later, the circumstances changed and I ended up spending almost a year with the company.
With Bungie, I applied multiple times over multiple years with the absolute worst applications (even when I had networking “ins”) that I thought were great. Years later (and after I said to a friend “I can’t ever imagine working at Bungie”) – an opportunity availed itself. By that time I’d learned how to make better resumes and give better interviews. As of this writing, that’s where I spend most of my time day-to day.
Obviously, you’re going to have your own story that doesn’t involve the exact same circumstances. But the odds are in your favor, if you keep knocking on doors, that you’ll be surprised in your own way as well.
Start by finding “silver linings”.
If subjective failure always presents lessons, your first step in dealing with that kind of failure is to look for the lessons. These almost always appear as what we’d colloquially call “silver linings”.
Maybe you didn’t work out today because you were exhausted – but that also means you’ve learned your current physical limits.
Perhaps you procrastinated and played games all day when you should’ve been practicing sound design – but now you know one of your potential bad habits, and indicators that you’re procrastinating.
Potentially you created something and got some feedback that was critical and negative – but now you have an opportunity to both squash your ego and a fast track to improving your skills.
I realize that reading this and practicing it are two completely different things. But, this is the exact place you start. The more often you give yourself a minute to recognize you’re tempted to be self-critical, and take that indicator to look for lessons, the better you’ll get at this.
De-personalize the event.
The hardest step to start finding those “silver linings” is getting past your self-critical mind. It’s very easy to think that you suck, someone hates you, that you’ve done something wrong, or you blew it.
Maybe you even did blow it!
But, this actually doesn’t indicate anything about you other than you’re capable of failure. Hi, welcome, we’re all human – literally all of us fail.
The “key” realization to make here is probably the hardest thing to act on in this whole article, but you must mentally establish that your worth as a human is not measured in outcomes and performance. I’d argue that your worth as a person has absolutely nothing at all to do with what you do.
For creatives especially, that seems both impossible to grasp and potentially sounds like heresy. But, it’s true and gives you a lot of freedom. And yes, it will take a lifetime for you to mentally master.
But again, the better you get at this, the more that external circumstances and opinions will roll right off you and quickly become lessons to dive back into your learning sandbox with.
“But Adaaam!” you say, “Are you telling me it’s okay, and maybe even desirable for me to fail?!”
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. Not in all cases – you don’t want to be a massive human jerk. But, in learning how to better yourself, experimentation is necessary and therefore so is failure. The more often you experiment, the more often you “fail”, the more lessons avail themselves to you.
Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to encourage you to idolize failure and fail at every possible chance you can get…. but I’ll be more concerned about that with you when you no longer fear failure at all.
Until then, go crazy and get a little out of your comfort zone.
So let’s sum this up…
- “Failing” that’s measured by a subjective standard isn’t really failure at all, but a lesson and opportunity to improve
- “Failing” now does not mean failure forever
- You make “failure” impossible to achieve when you start looking for those lessons and diving into your learning sandbox
- De-personalizing an event an establishing that your worth isn’t externally defined will exponentially increase your learnings and success
- Apparently, I really like sandboxes
Failures usually end up with success if you stick to it.
Remember that roof design that nearly killed a bunch of people? That building is still standing today. The roof was rebuilt, and the building re-opened exactly two years and one day later for a Hartford Whalers NHL game.
So if near tragedy couldn’t stop that place, what’s stopping you?
Come watch me fail.
As a personal example of this, I’m on social media and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. But, you can consistently find me in two places:
Instagram on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.
Twitch on Saturdays from 2:00pm-4:00pm Pacific time (USA).
Come hang out and watch me experiment in real time. You’ll see what you can learn from and what I’m learning from, too.
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