"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail
again. Fail Better."
–Samuel Beckett T Shirt
Failure.
Finally, a topic Charlie and Karol don’t have to research! They failed to alert people in a timely fashion that the Failure Schmooze date had changed, and some folks showed up the wrong
week. They failed to get this blog post up in a timely fashion
(seriously, this recap is for the January Schmooze, and it’s nearly freakin’ May). And they failed to realize how often the horrific words “timely
fashion” would come back to haunt them (particularly in regard to these blog
posts). What they did not fail to do, however, was to have a terrific Failure
Schmooze.
Joking aside, your trusty co-coordinators did, of course,
research this, if only as a fail-safe against the Schmooze consisting of
listening to Charlie whine about his lack of success for two hours. It turned
out that there was a goldmine of information out there. So much so, in fact,
that the focus of this particular blog post will not be the usual “hilarious”
chatty blather about the Schmooze and how great Charlie and Karol are (though they are great,
of course), but a more sober and outward looking journey into what they found
on the topic of failure. They hope it doesn’t fail to enlighten and – yes – amuse you, dear Schmoozers.
Failure, it seems, is a hugely popular and studied subject,
not just in the self-obsessed, arty world of writers, but in the cold, hard,
nuts-and-bolts world of business and non-profits, too. There’s a terrific website,
for instance, called
Admitting Failure where regular folks, non-profits, and
companies publish their most horrific stories of hubris and failure in the
hopes of educating others on the mistakes that one can make. They are not only
often hilarious, but they seem to relate directly to the struggles faced by
artists. For one thing, almost all of the stories start with Grand Intentions
and Inspiring Thoughts.
One of the key things Charlie and Karol learned was that
failure is not necessarily a negative thing. Steve Jobs says failing publicly
in the most humiliating fashion when he was kicked out of Apple was an
opportunity in disguise. It allowed him to “be a beginner again. It freed me to
enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
Read more here:
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/steve-jobs-failure-recovery-eric-brunsell
Of course, if you’re not already super wealthy and
successful like Steve Jobs, failure can be a bit harder to take. So how
do you deal with it? One of the best answers came from an article in
Business Insider, the gist of which is: Think of failure as a data-point – one more bit of
information you can use on your way to success.
Malcolm Gladwell says to simply ignore failure and just keep
working. The outcome, he says, is not as important as the amount of time you
spend trying (he’s the guy who came up with the idea that you have to work
10,000 hours at something to gain true expertise). “…The people at the top
don’t just work harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much,
much harder,” Gladwell said in “Outliers: The Story of Success.” Stumbling upon
this in their research, both Charlie and Karol felt this was a very depressing
thought and took to their beds to recover.
More enticing was
Gladwell’s essay in The New Yorker
encouraging us all to “embrace doubt,” because it “allowed for alternative ways
to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable
circles and self-feeding despondency.” Charlie found this particularly
revelatory as he had no idea “self-feeding despondency” was a
bad thing.
But the most useful words of wisdom Karol and Charlie discovered in their
Google journey through the universe of defeat was in
an article by Heidi Grant Halvorson about the need to give ourselves permission to screw up. She cited
studies showing that “people approach any task with one of two mindsets: what I
call the “Be-Good” mindset, where your focus is on proving that you have a lot
of ability… and the “Get-Better” mindset, where your focus is on developing
ability. You can think of it as the difference between wanting to prove
that you are smart, and wanting to get smarter.”
Apparently, those who approached challenges focusing on
getting better rather than succeeding outright both enjoyed the challenges more
and, ultimately, succeeded much more often. It’s not that they failed less;
they just tried more. Failure doesn’t register as anything personal with them,
so it doesn’t slow them down. Improving is the only thing that matters to folks
with this mindset.
Of course, Charlie and Karol did research artistic failure
as well. The odd thing was, though, that there were many more warnings about
success ruining artists than failure. As
Joyce Carol Oates said in her essay NotesOn Failure, “early commercial success can
actually stunt a writer’s progress just as early ‘failure’ can contribute to a
writer’s success. “
All of this led up to the fascinating notion, put out by
Paul Schoemaker and the late Robert Gunther in
Screwing Up On Purpose in the Harvard Business Review,
that one of the most reliable ways to succeed was to deliberately fail! To
attack projects and make choices that are expected to fail… If such a project
succeeds, they argue, its success is likely to be large and ground breaking.
Examples of this abound: South Park, Breaking Bad, A Wrinkle In Time, Harry
Potter…”
Finally, dear Schmoozers, if all
this seems a bit too touchy-feely for you and what you really want is practical tips
to help you recover from failure, here’s 12, courtesy of Psychology Today and
Business Insider:
12 Tips about recovering from
failure! (Full text HERE)
1) Recognize
you’re suffering from a serotonin drop-off.
2) You
may also be suffering from a Oxytocin (love hormone) drop-off.
3) Most
who recover well have a good sense of humor and don’t take themselves too
seriously.
4) People
who think intelligence is fixed at birth are more afraid of failure and find it
harder to cope. (Nothing you can do if game is fixed)
5) Over-shielding
a child from failure makes him or her more prone to getting an anxiety
disorder.
6) Don’t
blame everything on yourself, but don’t blame everything on outside forces
either.
7) Accept
the factors that are out of your control.
8) Don’t
be afraid to reach out to others—support groups give you a place to vent and
ask for help.
9) Try
keeping a journal to make sense of your personal story.
10) Sometimes you shouldn’t
get back on the horse. Sometimes
you have moved on, and it’s time to make a change in your life because you no
longer care the same things you used to.
11) Crisis opens doors you
never saw as an option.
12) It can be just as hard
to recover from success. (After
dopamine fires when you have success, it dips back to regular levels and leaves
you wanting more and feeling bad.
Charlie and Karol would love to end this blog post with a commitment to get current on all the 2014 Schmooze recap blog posts and
never, EVER get behind again…but that would just be setting themselves up for failure. So
instead, they’ll give you a couple more fun links...
...And a wimpy, “We’ll try our best…we promise!”
Keep passing the open windows,
Charlie & Karol
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