Searching for failure

Recently I failed at something I had spent the majority of my waking time over the last ten months working on. I don’t think I’ve ever worked as intensely on something that didn’t more or less work out, which means this was my biggest ever failure. It was also my best.

The ground of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is well trodden, so I’m not here to rehash tired clichés. Received wisdom like that can make failure seem like an trivial thing. Real failure is anything but: Personally this experience has been incredibly costly and has hammered my confidence into the ground. More broadly, failure can be horrible, sometimes even horrific and can cause awful, permanent damage.

None of what I’m going to say denies this bad stuff. But nor is it negated by it.

If you start from the premise that we can do pretty much anything we set our mind to, then interesting question becomes not “what can I do?”; but “what can I not do — and how do I know?” For example, could I, with enough effort and time, become a successful actor? It seems unlikely, but what if I took some lessons, joined a troupe and discovered a passion for it? It’s not implausible that if I put in enough time and effort I could get pretty good — maybe even very good.

This is a silly example, but it’s also instructive because most of us have a positive definition of who we are: here’s the list of all the stuff I can do, and therefore this is who I am. But if it’s true we’re capable of doing most things, all this description does is list everything you happened to have tried in life. A better description is a negative one: here’s a list of all the stuff I can’t do, and therefore this is who I am.

This is why failure is important: it is one of the few ways we have to truly learn about ourselves (serious illness is another). With each failure we get a new point of hard data and if you connect these points, the line you sketch will be a map of your boundaries. If you have enough points you’ll begin to sketch the contours of yourself.

By definition these contours are your limits. The idea of personal limits is one that perhaps doesn’t gel that all well with the superficial and self-promotional notions that are pervasive in many aspects of our culture, but the human truth is everyone has limits. The difference is that some have self-imposed limits, some inherit them from parents and some are accepted from society. Few have discovered limits.

I discovered my limit working through French in a professional consulting environment. And while that limit doesn’t stretch as far as I’d like or it needed to be, to be honest, it’s a lot further than I would have thought. I pushed the boat out as far as I could on this one, actually I pushed it out so far that I ended up drowning, but that’s OK, even if it takes a while to get my breath back. Pushing the boat out is scary, but anyone who doesn’t risk getting soggy and cold and wet will spend most of their time assuming things about themselves that in reality they have no way of knowing. And it seems to me, the number of actual personal limits we have versus the number of accepted, imposed or inherited limits is way less, and not only that, but the boundary of the real limits are far wider than the boundary of our accepted limits.

The reason, I think, why this failure feels so catastrophic is because it doesn’t happen that often: It’s actually rare that I hit up against a real limit; what is much more common is that I impose my own limit, or I accept one imposed from elsewhere.

This means that we’re going about failure all wrong. Usually we do all we can to avoid a situation where we might fail. The mantra seems to be “better to try succeed at something you know than risk failing at something you don’t”. It’s an algorithm that is equivalent to using Facebook as your primary way to meet people, or Netflix your only source of new films: You’ll get lots of stuff you like, but the feedback loop will just keep giving you Liam Neeson killing yet more bad guys in slightly different plot contexts; and all your parties will be boring because they’ll be filled with people who are all the same.

Most people will agree that always watching the same type of film because you’re worried you might waste an evening on something boring or never meeting different people because you’re scared they won’t like you is not a great way to live your life. But there’s a dissonance when it comes to the bigger decisions. Of course the difference between choosing a film and a job is that the consequences of a bad career move are a lot scarier and uncertain. Security is important and success is certainly more pleasant than failure, but what I’m getting at is more fundamental than that. It is about getting to know yourself, which I would argue over the totality of the ebbs and flows of your life, is the most important thing you’ll do.

This is why the burden of proof therefore shouldn’t be on proving what we can do, but rather what we can’t. Failure is the evidence that you’ve just reached out to try touch the edges your own real potential, not the potential you are told you have, or that you were given, but the one you were born with and the one you will die with.

So even though it would be a lot more fun to tell everyone “I’m smashing my job, despite working through a language I couldn’t speak 2.5 years ago”, the compensation is that I now know something about myself that I didn’t before. In the immediate vacuum of a failure, this hardly seems like compensation at all, but it is this kind of self-knowledge that sticks around long after the sting has gone and allows you to see your contours while everyone else is guessing at theirs.

Crashing up against your own boundaries hurts, but there’s no way to do it gently, because going slowly and carefully will never get you out far enough. You need to get the head down and plough through, and when you smack against something that hurts, what you’re really doing is hitting up against yourself.

Few people know with certainty how far they can go, which means they never really get to map out who they are. If you’re as ferociously curious about who you are and who can be as I am, start failing.

Thanks Gunnar & Katy for ideas and edits!