True secret of success? Make LOTS of mistakes
It sounds totally crazy. But in an uplifting new book, MATTHEW SYED argues that only by embracing failure can you improve your life
AcOupLe of months ago, I went to a large dinner party thrown by my friend Jane. We met through my wife, and she’s great company.
For most of the evening, which was a pleasant affair, the 20 or so guests sipped wine and chatted about the many laughs we’ve shared with our hostess, who, as always, was the life and soul of the evening.
near the end, however, the mood changed and Jane seemed rather downbeat.
‘I haven’t achieved even a quarter of what I hoped for when I left university,’ she said. ‘I have two lovely kids, and a decent job, but I wanted to change the world. I don’t think I have changed anything much.’
It’s a common lament for people in late middle age. We start to reflect not just on what we have achieved, but on what we have failed to achieve, too.
But I’d like to suggest that this shouldn’t be a cause for gloom or despondency. provided we react in the right way, feelings of failure are a healthy — and entirely natural — response.
The realisation that there might be more to life can be the spur to exploration and reinvention. It’s all too easy to delude ourselves that our lives are wonderful.
We are often nudged into this way of thinking by the ‘ positive thinking’ lobby, who insist that we need to see everything as a blessing. That our jobs are amazing, our relationships wonderful, and that everything is blissful.
If you speak to anyone who has read too many self-help books, you will note that their smiles are a little forced, and the stories they tell of how swimmingly things are going are a little contrived.
The philosophy underpinning this approach is that if you imagine everything is perfect, then everything will — by a process of social osmosis that’s never quite spelled out — become perfect.
But, to my mind, nothing could be further from the truth. If we dwell on negatives for too long, and accentuate the bad stuff, we will become downbeat and helpless. But, accepting that life could be better is the only way to make it better.
Dissatisfaction and failure, far from being a psychological disaster, is the fuel that leads to change and renewal. It is 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.
JAMeSDySOn, 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, and was so het up with it, that he had the impetus to build a new type of machine. Innovation, in this sense, is a response.
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.
The collapsible buggy was a response to the impracticality of unwieldy prams (Owen Maclaren, the designer, came up with the idea after watching his daughter struggling with a pram while out with his granddaughter).
The ATM was a response to the problem of getting hold of cash outside opening hours. It was invented by John ShepherdBarron while lying in the bath one night, worrying because he had forgotten to go to the bank.
This idea that innovation happens in response to failures and frustrations is now so widespread that it has spawned its own terminology. It is called the ‘problem phase’ of innovation.
Isn’t this how innovation happens in our personal lives, too? Think of any volitional change in your life and, more often than not, you will see that it emerged from a realisation that things could be better.
For example, I made the transition from Olympic table tennis player to journalism when I realised that 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 whether he would 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-and-a-half later, I am now a full- time writer and newspaper columnist. Had I engaged in positive thinking, pretending that my existing life was perfect, this would never
have happened — and I would have been a lot less happy.
One of the great stumbling blocks to midlife reinvention is the idea that an older brain is not capable of changing much; that it somehow runs out of steam. But this is quite wrong.
‘The mind doesn’t burn out,’ Mark Walton says in his book, Boundless Potential. ‘Neuroscientists over the past decade have done work that has found the mature brain is organised differently than the younger brain, and when it’s adequately challenged, it keeps growing and developing. The human brain was never designed for decline or retirement, but for continual reinvention.’
In evidence, he interviews people such as sherwin ‘shep’ Nuland, who after a career as a surgeon became an acclaimed author, and Gil Garcetti, who was the lawyer responsible for prosecuting (unsuccessfully) O.J. simpson and is, today, a photographer and activist, who has done life- changing work in West Africa. What all these people shared was the capacity to look outwards, and to recognise that change cannot happen unless you are open to it.
Of course, we may get things wrong, but isn’t this how we grow? Perfectionism, far from being a blessing, is a curse.
Take the story of rick, that psychologists ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz discuss in their book, Fail Fast, Fail Often.
rick was a brilliant computer scientist who, years before the world had even invented the word blog, had the idea of creating a web service that would allow people to post text online.
rick soon had a working prototype. But instead of giving consumers a chance to use it, perceive its weaknesses and make changes, he procrastinated.
He didn’t want anyone to see the prototype until it was perfect and so rick spent four years working on a way to make his idea even more efficient.
HIsapproach proved disastrous. Babineaux and Krumboltz wrote: ‘Over the next four years, he got more and more mired in technical details and lost sight of his original idea.
‘Meanwhile, other entrepreneurs began to build blogging platforms. The difference was that they put their flawed efforts out into the world for others to try. In doing so, they received crucial feedback, evolved their software and made millions of dollars.’
What this tells us is that in order to succeed, we have to fail along the way. In the book, the two psychologists have some advice for those who are prone to the curse of perfectionism.
It involves repeating the following mantras: ‘If I want to be a great musician, I must first play a lot of bad music.’
‘If I want to become a great tennis player, I must first lose lots of tennis games.’
There is obviously a balance to be struck here. If we wake up and want to try new things every day, to reinvent our lives, it would lead to chaos — not just for ourselves, but for our loved ones, too.
Not all change has to be revolutionary. Often we can have a big impact with many small changes. Indeed, James Dyson developed his vacuum cleaner prototype by making 5,126 small tweaks over a long period of time.
This can also be applied to our own lives. Take something as simple as dieting. A newspaper found that the cumulative effect of avoiding a daily Kit Kat was the loss of ‘a pound every two weeks and 85,045 calories — and 24 lb — a year’. That tiny changes can lead to long-term gains is clear.
Far from being too late, 50, 60 or 70 is a perfect time for reinvention. To say inwardly that things are not perfect, is not a crime but a realisation that there’s more to do.
It opens us to the world, orients our brains in the right direction: outward, not inward. Isn’t this the most thrilling way to live?