THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS
Life isn’t perfect or easy and don’t expect it to be if you want to get ahead
Former British Olympic table tennis player Matthew Syed has written a fascinating book that examines the merits of failure.
WHAT if the important project you are working on bombs? What if your boss fires you and you can’t put food on the table? As you toss and turning in bed at night after a bad day at the office, your mind whirls relentlessly, playing out a terrifying loop of gloomy worst-case scenarios. What if, what if, what if . . .
From a young age we’ve been taught failure is the worst thing that can ever happen to us. So we try to avoid it at all costs by playing it safe. But is this the right approach? In his uplifting new book, Black Box Thinking, former British Olympic table tennis player Matthew Syed argues that rather than fearing failure, we should embrace it. Here he explains how failure can be a blessing in disguise, ultimately leading to success beyond our wildest imaginings.
WE’VE been groomed to be positive: our jobs are amazing, our relationships are wonderful, everything is blissful. To express discontentment or disappointment is somehow seen as taboo – and so we’re always putting on a happy face and pretending everything is hunky-dory.
But to my mind dissatisfaction and failure, far from being a psychological disaster, is the fuel that leads to change and renewal. It’s the place from which we find our deepest inspiration.
Think about how innovation happens in the real world. Great inventors always develop their insights not from an appraisal of how good everything is but from what is going wrong.
British innovator James Dyson, for example, invented the dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner because he was so frustrated with the existing model, which kept losing suction and let out a highpitched scream when the bag clogged up. It was precisely because he engaged with this failure that he had the impetus to build a new type of machine.
Masking tape was a response to the failure of existing adhesive tape, which would rip the paint off when it was removed from cars and walls.
This idea that innovation happens in response to failures and frustrations is now so widespread it’s spawned its own terminology. It’s called the “problem phase” of innovation.
Isn’t this how innovation happens in our personal lives too? Think of any change you willingly made to your life – a change of career, a move to a new city – and more often than not you’ll see it emerged from a realisation that things could be better.
For example, I made the transition from Olympic table tennis player to journalist when I realised the career path mapped out for me from international player to coach to a sports administration role was too narrow. It wasn’t enough. I wanted to do other things with my life.
The day after this revelation I phoned a national newspaper and asked the sports editor if he’d like a diary column in the build-up to the 2000 Olympics.
“Let’s try a few,” he said, “and see how it goes.” A decade later, I’m now a fulltime writer and newspaper columnist. Had I engaged in positive thinking, pretending my existing life was perfect, this would never have happened – and I’d have been a lot less happy.
ONE OF the great stumbling blocks to midlife reinvention is the idea that an older brain isn’t capable of changing much; that it somehow runs out of steam. But this is quite wrong.