#65: Reflections on a recent failure
We all hate failure. We're terrified of it. And so, when I chalked up a big fat failure a few days ago, I knew immediately that I needed to dissect it for you lot. The key lesson here? Our unwillingness to look failure square in the face is holding us back.
Read Costica Bradatan's Psyche essay about Emil Cioran here.
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Have you ever failed, my friend? Silly question, sorry. Of course you have. I’ll bet that your CV of failures trips off your tongue far quicker and more easily than your CV of impressive accomplishments. You keep your failures in the storefront of your consciousness, don’t you, while you relegate your successes to the stock room, where they’re accessible only after an effortful period of digging around.
What are our failures good for? I expect you’re familiar with the narrative that the road to success is paved with failures - that if we want to achieve good things, we have to prepare to fail along the way. That makes failures an unavoidable part of success. It’s a ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ type of arrangement. This sort of view entails that it’s important not to be afraid of failure, because avoiding failure means never seeing success. But is this it? Is there anything else failure can do for us?
I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on this over the last few days, because last weekend I failed spectacularly, dramatically, and publicly. I was due to run a marathon in Wales. In Pembrokeshire, in fact, which is where I grew up. The marathon started and ended in Tenby, which is where I went to school. I’d spent months training for it, and hours discussing it with Carrie, my running coach. My family was there, cheering me on. I’d told people I was doing it. I was using it to raise funds for Headway, the brain injury charity, in support of a wonderful friend who suffered a brain injury last month. But, as things turned out, I ran 20 of the 26.2 miles, and then had to drop out. I failed. I got my first dreaded DNF (did not finish). And I failed in a way that didn’t allow for slinking quietly off without anyone noticing. The whole thing was a bit embarrassing. Why was it embarrassing? Well, there’s the thing about lots of people knowing I was doing it, and wanting to know how I got on, and asking me about it afterwards. And then, as super-attentive listeners of this podcast might remember, I run in bare feet, which made the whole thing even worse, because - in my mind at least - people would be thinking, ‘Of course you didn’t finish it, you idiot, you didn’t have any bloody shoes on’. I felt a bit like the comedian Steve Coogan’s character, Alan Partridge, who in one series is recovering from a mental breakdown about which we are told nothing other than that he once gorged on Toblerone and drove to Dundee in bare feet. (I didn’t gorge on Toblerone, although my dad did buy me some fudge afterwards.) And, in fact, there was some truth to that attitude. It was the barefoot running that was the problem, in the end. I’ve run a marathon in bare feet before, but this time it turned out that almost the entire course was newly resurfaced with very jagged stones. It was uncomfortable at two miles and unbearable at 20. When a couple of the lovely marshals approached me and asked if I was ok, I started crying, and they called someone to pick me up. Queuing for a massage afterwards, I was the only runner who had put on her shoes to recover - all the others had taken theirs off.
Now, with a new podcast episode to make this week, it would be a terrible waste not to draw in some way on this experience of failure. Almost everyone who comes to me for coaching or who writes to me about the podcast is worried about failure. It’s all ‘I’m afraid of failure’ or ‘Am I a failure?’ or ‘What if people think I’m a failure’ - I’m sure you know the sort of thing. So, what’s the lesson to draw here?
One lesson is the oft-repeated idea that we can, if we take up the right sort of can-do attitude, use our failures as springboards to success. If you want success, you’ve got to be prepared to fail. You’ve got to embrace it, even. It’s an opportunity to learn valuable lessons. The more failures you have on your CV, the more you know about what it’s going to take to succeed. This is the so-called ‘noble failure’ approach - or, less fancily, trial-and-error. Failures are good because they teach you how to succeed.
Now, this all sounds very sensible. Trial and error works as a route to success only if you’re ok with the whole ‘errors’ thing. Failing is good if it helps you succeed. But, to go back to that question I raised at the beginning - What are our failures good for? - noting that failures can create opportunities to succeed barely scratches the surface. Because what does ‘success’ even mean? Given how preoccupied we are with it, how we often equate it with happiness, and how we hold it in such esteem that we’re even prepared to fail multiple times in order to get there, you’d expect that we’d know the answer to this question. But, in fact, often we don’t. I’ve said it before on this podcast, but I’ve coached plenty of people who have spent years, decades even, working to achieve their version of success - only to get there and realise that, actually, it’s not what they want. Other clients have reflected on the life they want and, through coaching, find that they are pretty much already there, and it’s their own negative self-talk that’s preventing them from enjoying it in the way they thought they would. And lots of us don’t even allow ourselves to work out what sort of life we’d like to be living, if anything were possible - I talked about that way back in episodes #5: Bitch, do you even dream? and #6: Live the dream! So, in sum, unless you’re in the habit of engaging in serious reflection on what it is that you want, and why, and whether you’re going about getting it in the most sensible and effective way, you probably don’t even really know what success means, for you. That’s something else I’ve talked about before, in episode #25: You don’t know what ‘success’ means until you know who you are. Jeez Rebecca, get on with it - are you just going to spend 20 minutes telling us what you’ve said in past episodes or do you actually have anything new to say?
Well, yes, you cheeky sods, I do, actually. I was mulling over my marathon failure for a couple of days, thinking about what a great opportunity it presents to reflect on failure, and thinking about what I might say. Then I came across an article in Psyche by Costica Bradatan (whose name I might have just mispronounced) about the 20th century Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran (whose name I might also have just mispronounced). I wasn’t familiar with this philosopher. He committed his life to doing … nothing. He avoided having a job. He lived off handouts. He embraced idleness, except when he was writing about what he was doing. He did it because he believed that being a loser was the best way to understand the world. Most of us do the opposite: we go after success, getting there is all we can think about, and when we fail, we ‘sugarcoat’ it (to use Bradatan’s term) by framing it as an experience that moves us closer to our eventual success, and then we stop thinking about it as quickly as possible and turn our attention back to the success that we’re aiming for. Often what we’re doing here is just another form of perfectionism: we can’t stand the idea that things might be turning out less peachy than we’d hoped, and so we end up hell-bent on looking on the bright side. We look for the silver lining and ignore the cloud. That makes things more comfortable for us - it’s depressing to dwell on the negatives, after all - but it does mean that we miss an opportunity to gain important insights into ourselves.
This is something that chimed with me after I dropped out of my marathon. I’m not happy about the way things turned out, of course, but it did occur to me that the insights I was having about the experience are probably things I’d have missed if it had all gone well - because if it had all gone well I would have been too busy feeling pleased about my success to learn uncomfortable lessons. As an example of an uncomfortable lesson here, I didn’t take shoes with me on the marathon, even though I could have done. I considered it briefly, but not very seriously. Why not? I found myself wondering in the glum aftermath of my DNF. Part of the answer was that I didn’t think I’d need them - I’d done that distance in bare feet before, after all, and I’m used to running on rough surfaces. But there was something else, too: I was being a bit of a show-off, although perhaps just to myself. Running a marathon barefoot was, I’d decided, a less cool achievement if I was carrying shoes just in case. So, I did the risky and irresponsible thing when I could have chosen the sensible and well-prepared thing, and left the shoes in the car. Why was I like this? It’s perfectionism, again: apparently it wasn’t enough to run a marathon, I had to do it in a fancy way, and I think that part of why I wanted to do it in a fancy way was that I know I’m not a super-fast runner and so I had to find another way to one-up everyone else. That’s a very uncomfortable thing to realise about myself, and it’s uncomfortable to share it here. It’s not an attractive quality. But still, realising that it’s a quality I have makes it something I can engage with and address. Would I be thinking about this if the marathon had gone as well as I’d hoped it would? Of course not. I’d have been too busy feeling pleased with myself. I’d have been less likely, not more likely, to carry shoes next time, and I certainly wouldn’t have explored what attitudes and values lay behind decisions like this.
Now, it’s true that failure can push us to look deep and learn things about ourselves, but success can do that too. Here, I’m thinking about those clients I mentioned earlier, who finally achieve what they’ve spent decades trying to achieve, and then feel jaded with it. Success can be disappointing, especially if you’ve gone after it without questioning what you’re doing, without pushing yourself to explore why exactly this particular goal is so important to you and whether there might be other ways to get the things that you hope achieving this goal will give you. In cases like that, you get what you want and then - after an initial honeymoon period where you feel great - you feel depressed and directionless. Feeling that way can make you very receptive to making important insights about yourself - but, what an expensive lesson. All those years spent pursuing a version of success that turned out to be disappointing. All those missed opportunities where you could have been using your time and energy in more satisfying ways. Better to learn these lessons about yourself from failure, if you can. It happens more often, after all. But we don’t always do that - we’re busy bouncing back from failure onto the road to success, often without noticing that we don’t really know what ‘success’ means.
So, what am I saying here? Fail more often? Spend more time feeling depressed? Well, no. I’m not going to push you to live like Emil Cioran. But I do think we could all be learning more from our failures than we typically do. It’s true that, as Bradatan observes, we tend to sugarcoat failure. But sugarcoating failure is something we do when we’re not actually in the process of failing. Fresh from a failure, we just feel miserable about it. We’re not ready to look on the bright side yet. When we’re in this state, we can feel pressure to move on as quickly as possible and get back to being the cheerful positive go-getters that we are convinced we ought to be. But if, instead, we gave ourselves permission to sit with the uncomfortable feeling of failure, and to reflect on why things have gone the way they’ve gone, and what we can learn about ourselves from the way we went about pursuing our goal, then perhaps we can make important insights. Those insights might - and often do - involve learning lessons that will help us achieve success next time. But they’re also an opportunity to examine what success is, for us.
Perhaps, then, we don’t need to be so afraid of failure. We don’t need to sugarcoat it. We can be brave and look directly at it. I worry that, not only is this sugarcoating of failure discouraging us from learning important lessons, but it also exacerbates the extent to which we fear failure, and the extent to which we feel bad when it happens. Because this constant reframing failure as a stepping stone to success, this constant pushing failure out of public view, makes it seem like failure happens less often than it actually does. And that makes us feel particularly awful when we fail. We feel like we’re doing something that nobody else, with their instagram-polished, final-draft lives, does. We’ve not only experienced something painful when we fail, but relatively rare. I wonder how much braver we might be if we normalised failure. There’s plenty of opportunity to do that, after all. Didn’t get out of bed the second your alarm sounded this morning? Fail. Didn’t make that deadline you thought you’d make? Sorry, fail. Is your desk dustier and messier than you’d like? Another fail. I’m not trying to make you feel bad here, but I’m not trying to make you feel good either. ‘We fail all the time, in things large and small’, as Bradatan writes. What is it telling us? Why aren’t you getting out of bed when your alarm goes off? Is there something you want to hide from? Why do you think it’s so important to get up at that time anyway? Etc.
You’re listening to this episode on the back of yet another failure from me: I thought I’d get this episode all finished two days ago, but I didn’t, so here I am at the crack of dawn finishing it off, and denying myself coffee until it’s done. When you fail today - and you will, in some way - pause and take a look at what’s happened. Is there one insight you can make about yourself as a result?
Next time, imperfectionists.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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