Don’t glamorize failure. It can be illuminating, but you likely don’t know why it didn’t work

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In school, parents and teachers hounded us to avoid failure. But at work in recent years, we have been taught to be more accepting of failure, even to celebrate it as a stepping stone to success or an indication of a wrong course we can now quickly correct.
“It’s almost as if failure has been fetishized. Nearly worshipped as a right of passage, a prerequisite, a required step on the way,” Jason Fried, chief executive officer of software company Basecamp, writes on his blog.
He thinks we have to give it less attention. Most things don’t work out, after all. Plenty of things you pour extensive energy into won’t succeed. Some might even land you in a perilous spot.
So with the odds perpetually, and naturally, stacked against you, he argues for viewing failure as just part of the routine. “I’ve always just felt that some stuff works out better than other stuff. I think that’s the healthiest way to think about it. Just a drop of relative recognition is all it deserves,” he says.
He also doesn’t think you’ll find many lessons reviewing what didn’t work. You probably don’t really know why it didn’t work anyway. It feels good to imagine you do, but you probably don’t. Besides, history doesn’t show many cases where people swapped one presumed right thing for one wrong thing and everything turned out rosy. “More likely, [it’s] a swirling confluence of decisions, ideas, events, timing, conditions and serendipity that drove it off the map,” he notes.
Venture capitalist Sahil Bloom has another view: Failure is a skill that you need to develop. If you’re weak at it, you may allow a stumble to derail your confidence, break your flow and slow your progress. “But unfortunately, failure is not a skill that any of us learn to develop in school,” he writes on his blog.
Indeed, he suggests people who are high achievers throughout their school years are often the worst at failure in early adulthood, because they’ve never had to contend with it. Their experience has taught them success is a given.
When failure occurs, he urges you to give yourself time before responding. Zoom out. Sit with the feelings and emotions but try to minimize the frustration and certainly avoid hasty action. “Don’t inflate the size of the failure in your mind – most failures are micro details, not macro issues,” he says.
Then become a scientist. Gather information about what happened and how did it differ from your expectation. Analyze why it might have happened. What elements of your process might have contributed to this outcome? What are the underlying insights from the unexpected result?
This gives it far more attention than Mr. Fried recommends, but Mr. Bloom argues “the cold, emotionless, disciplined analysis establishes accountability for the failure that sparks you into your next action. Becoming a scientist means determining the variables that are within your control, understanding them in detail and focusing your energy on improving them for the next attempt.”
Information, he adds, is nothing without action. In the wake of a failure, default to action. But remember action doesn’t have to be perfect for it to be right.
In my own tai chi practice, I was reminded recently that failure can simply mean: Not now. I noticed two things I had been unable to do in the past suddenly happening with ease, unasked but a welcome, heartening, surprise. I had plugged away at them: Once all weekend at a workshop, with virtually no success, and for the other activity at classes periodically over 18 months, when raised by the instructor, with feeble, perhaps even comical, results.
I tried and tried – analyzed and analyzed – and then didn’t act further but more in line with Mr. Fried’s thinking moved on to other things, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Then spontaneously I had mastered – more accurately, my body had become ready to handle – what in the past was beyond me.
At work, we often wail when something is suggested, “We tried it before and it didn’t work!” That can be a worthwhile warning. But it’s also possible the “swirling confluence of decisions, ideas, events, timing, conditions and serendipity” make it now possible. Perhaps, at least to some extent, everything worthwhile has a time – its own time.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.