No one likes to fail, although we all do. Many of us are crippled by the fear of failure, and we may make bad personal and professional choices to attempt - always unsuccessfully - to avoid it.
Yet failure is the elixir of growth and development. Without failing, we can never become our most complete selves.
I recently read Designing your life: build the perfect career step by step by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It’s a well-known work about, well, ‘building the perfect career’. It’s based on a set of quite demanding exercises, which I admit to not having tried yet.
I rather liked the section on developing ‘failure immunity’, which the authors think is a jolly good thing, as do I, especially for those considering the Leave Well | Live Better path.
They ask their reader to attempt a fascinating thought-experiment:
Imagine there was a vaccine that could prevent you from ever failing. Just one tiny shot, and your life would be guaranteed to go exactly as planned - nothing but smooth sailing and success after success, as far as your eye could see… Who doesn’t want to be immune to failure? Unfortunately, there’s no vaccine, and it’s impossible never to fail. But it is possible to be immune from failure.
Would you take the vaccine, if it existed?
By immunity to failure, Burnett and Evans means developing the ability to grow from failure - to reframe our failures as opportunities - ones we would never have had without failing first.
The notion that we build resilience, character and can only maximise our potential through failure, actually appears in the Bible. [For those who have forgotten that I’m a rabbi or don’t fancy this part, please skip it.]
For the righteous man falls seven times and rises, while the wicked man will stumble in evil. (Proverbs 23:16)
This is often understood to mean that the righteous keep getting up even if they fail many times. But the great Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner insists it really means that:
The very essence of the rise of the righteous man is through his seven failures… (Rabbi Y. Hutner, Letters and Writings, 128)
We need to first fail, perhaps many times, otherwise we cannot become our best selves. And we certainly won’t be able to Leave Well | Live Better.
We are refined and strengthened through failure.
We can only develop resistance, character and even antifragility (the subject of a future newsletter) by first failing.
Fear of failure - while natural and understandable - cripples our ability to grow.
Are you able to face failure on your route to Leave Well | Live Better? Would you take the anti-failure vaccine? Please tell me in the comments.
Next up: Leave Well | Live Better: The art of saying no
Have you heard about H2Org? My partner Helen and I help exceptional leaders navigate the next phase in their personal and professional adventure. Drop in here and be in touch.
Very much liked this. I have known people who haven't experienced any serious failures up until adult life and then when faced with a failure, they don't have the coping mechanisms to deal with it.
Fantastic. I love reading these as learn to Leave Well Live Better