Resilience – Is failure the key to success?

Resilience is becoming a more common theme for people looking to develop and improve, but perhaps achievement is not about persevering and trying, but about beginning to enjoy failure and learning new lessons from it.

Thomas Edison is quoted as saying, “I haven’t failed. I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” If you learn something new from each setback or failure, you continue to grow and improve. This is the whole idea of ​​reflective practice that exists in some professional streams, where you are expected to look back on a regular basis, spot key events, and analyze them with a view to learning from them.

But there is more to failure than accepting it for the sake of learning lessons. Peter Bregman, writing on his HBR blog on the subject in November 2009, suggests that we should enjoy ‘trying to achieve something’.

He lists three conditions that must be met in order for you to achieve anything. The first two would be generally accepted hope, meaning wanting to achieve something and believing that you can achieve it. If there is no desire and passion to achieve, then what will be your driving force. In fact, why are you bothering to target this? Second, if the goal is really impossible, you are wasting your time. Even if you just think it’s impossible, again, which will make you put 100% of your effort into the cause. As I write, the soccer world cup shows evidence of teams trailing a few goals and giving up simply because they no longer believe they can win.

The third condition that Bregman gives is that you should enjoy trying to achieve the goal. Actually, this is the opposite of achieving something: you have to positively enjoy the failures you encounter along the way. You have to be willing to try something over and over again, knowing that you will most likely fail in this attempt, but not letting it get you down.

Certainly, there is a danger that if we think we will not succeed, we either give up without trying or are so preoccupied with possible failure that our Self 1 completely distracts us from peak performance (see Inner Game of Work by W. Timothy Gallwey). . We need to adopt a Dr Pepper mindset and ask, “What’s the worst that can happen?”, then balance that with the positive results of failure, and continue regardless.

Once we start testing, we can have results, and from results flows learning and from learning comes improvement. But this then goes against the idea that people who just ‘try’ to achieve are not as successful as those who start with the knowledge that they will succeed.

So there are some negative aspects of this idea of ​​accepting failure that revolve around the idea that you set out with the expectation of failure. I don’t think this is what Bregman means.

Plan to succeed, and then if failure comes your way, accept it willingly, acknowledge it as a step along the way, and learn as much as you can from it. Get up and give it another chance. If you fail a second time, start seeing it as a challenge to overcome, like a game to play, like a puzzle to solve, finding the solution that will ultimately unlock the prize for you.

One example that comes to mind was in the realm of sales and marketing. It was something he had never tackled and believed he couldn’t do. Consequently, I left it to a colleague who had a lot of practice. When I no longer had time to devote to it, I had to try. After I stopped seeing rejections personally, I started seeing them as a game, to find the key that would unlock the sale, without trying to force it on the prospect. As I continued to persevere, I started to see small improvements, but I also enjoyed the game. As an unexpected bonus, I also found that I was getting better at talking to strangers, making small talk at parties, and actually becoming interested in people and their lives.

Yes, repetition can get boring if we allow it, however without repeated practice we will never be the best at what we do. Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book ‘Outliers’ acknowledges that it takes 4000 hours of practice at something to become a professional. 8,000 hours to become a master and 10,000 hours to become an artist at the top of your field. Without practice we will not reach the top.

However, what does all this mean for us in the world of work?

I think there are two applications, firstly to enhance the existing job we have and secondly to help us in finding a new job.

If we want to enjoy our current job, we need to recognize that the repetitive practices we are engaged in are not only dull and boring, but also challenging for us. How can we improve and become brilliant in them? How many hours will we voluntarily dedicate to our work to become a teacher? But also, how can we find interest in them and make our work more enjoyable? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book ‘Flow’ covers this in some detail.

However, it is to the art of the job search that I believe this concept applies most fully. Where else do we experience failures that set us back so easily, that we consider giving up? What elements of the process can you learn from? Maybe it’s the feedback from the company that made you back off. It may also be how you felt while writing the papers. Or maybe you’ve identified areas where you skimped and know you should have done better. Your heart just wasn’t in it and you’re well aware that your efforts were lacking? How well was your CV tailored to the specific job?

However, aside from learning for next time, how can you make it a game, pitting your wits against deadly recruiters, playing them in their own games, trying to build a strategy that will best them to get you hired?

The way we react when things go wrong can definitely be key to our ultimate success. I especially value learning, and one of my favorite quotes is “I’ve learned so much from my failures that I’m thinking of making a few more.” No, I am not planning to fail, but I am ready to embrace failure if it occurs and use it to my advantage, to achieve ultimate success.