Philosophy Friday: Succeed At Failure

Over the years, I have worked at multiple organisations sporting the ‘It’s Safe To Fail’ inspirational corporate motto. It must be a fashionable slogan since it is so frequently part of the policy. As so often happens in life, the reality proved different from the theory. Managers quietly punished project failure—team members were passed over for promotion or reallocated to other failing or dead-end initiatives. Employees got with the program and flocked towards safe projects. Market-disrupting game-changer ideas failed to attract sufficient talent to get off the ground. Often, start-ups with a greater appetite for risk would execute on similar projects and succeed.

We fail at failure—collectively and individually.

And that is not a good thing. We should be good at failure. By and large, we shun failure. Or, more accurately, we tend to shun the risk of failure. Stay safe and all that. But by avoiding the risk of failure, we also avoid the ‘risk’ of success. We cannot have one without the other. High pay-off initiatives that may succeed must simultaneously have a chance of failure too.

Failures do not have to be debilitating. They are feedback—a ‘this approach did not work’. They are in themselves neither good nor bad. It’s us who too often judge them as undesirable. There is much good to be had from a failure; if we so wish—we can learn from it, change our approach and hopefully succeed next time.

Much of our fear of failure revolves around what other people might think. Well, that really shouldn’t matter much. Being highly sensitive towards what other people think works well for us in small tribes fighting for their survival on the savanna. We no longer live in the ancestral environment, and therefore, this ancient instinct stops many of us from succeeding to our full potential.

“If you never fail, you’re only trying things that are too easy and playing far below your level… If you can’t remember any time in the last six months when you failed, you aren’t trying to do difficult enough things.”
– Eliezer Yudkowsky, Philosopher, AI Researcher & Author

So, maybe it’s time to rethink failure? Not something to avoid but a signal that we are playing in the vicinity of our true potential.

Are you failing enough? Are you operating close to the amazing things you could achieve if only you tried?