Could holding our failures up to the light be preferable to hiding them away?
If your successes in life appear small compared with the times you have ‘ failed’ at things, take heart. Some believe that holding failure up to the light, rather than hiding it away in the darkest recesses of our mind, can revolutionise the way we travel
By the time Erin LewisFitzgerald started her ‘Rejection Scorecard’, she had spent three solid months working on her book proposal. There was a lot at stake, yet the spreadsheet she set up to track submissions to publishers had a decidedly upbeat vibe.
“I called it the ‘Modern Mending Rejection Scorecard’,” says LewisFitzgerald, a Melbourne-based writer, maker and mender. “Then I added ‘Woohoo!’ to the title.”
Each time a rejection came in, as it inevitably did, Lewis-Fitzgerald would say to herself: “Wheee, I got another one!” She would type ‘1’ in the relevant cell and a simple formula within her spreadsheet automatically increased her rejection score.
Lewis-Fitzgerald kept her scorecard private, sharing it only with her partner and close friends. In contrast, Dr Melanie Stefan, a UK-based scientist, shared the idea of her ‘CV of Failures’ with the world.
Stefan’s musing on embracing failure, based on facing multiple rejections of Fellowship applications, was published in the scientific journal, Nature. Why did she choose to write on this topic? “It was entirely selfish!” she laughs. “Up until that time in my life, things had never seemed that difficult but then I got rejection after rejection after rejection. It felt horrible and I felt like I was the first person that it had ever happened to.”
BREAKING THE SILENCE
Objectively, Stefan knew that this was not the case but it still felt like it. “Whenever someone gets introduced for a talk, it’s always like, ‘This is Professor So-and-So and they’ve done all those awesome things’,” she says. “No one ever talks about the things they failed at.”
Her motivation to break the silence boiled down to: “Surely we should talk about this more.”
It seems we are. Despite it being 10 years since she wrote about her CV of Failures, Stefan, now a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, is regularly approached by other scientists to talk. “At conferences, people come up to me and say: ‘Oh, you’re that failure person’, and then we have interesting conversation about their insecurities and how they have managed to get through their careers,” she says. “I joke sometimes that I’m the poster girl of failure!”
Stefan believes we are gradually opening up to conversation around failure in all walks of life. Dr Maree Roche, co-director of the Leadership Institute at The University of Waikato in New Zealand, praises LewisFitzgerald and Stefan’s moves towards honesty around failure: “Instead of seeing failure as a blight on your personality, we’re recognising that failure is the norm,” she says.
Failure conversations have made their way into popular culture partly thanks to social media. The hashtag #EpicFail has made admitting failure far more acceptable, especially for younger people. Whether posted online or said in conversation (along with making the four-fingered hashtag shape), this is a sure way to introduce a degree of levity and camaraderie to an admission of failure. The trend of trying — and failing — to replicate others’ success can be hilarious. Whether it’s a cake decorating fail, a newborn posing fail, or a bizarre yoga pose fail, these posts shine a valuable light on how the lives shown in some heavily curated social media feeds are not as achievable as they seem.
Author J.K. Rowling has always been honest about how many times the first ‘Harry Potter’ book was rejected. “What I feared most at your age was failure,” she said in a 2008 speech to graduating Harvard students. “It is impossible to live without failing, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”
Honesty about failure is starting to be encouraged in business, a world where anything other than success is often denied or swept aside. The straight-shooting named ‘F**kup Nights’ are in-person events where entrepreneurs share a failure with an audience. These events claim to have allowed, in a single year, over one million people to bear witness to 15,000 confessions of failures across 90 countries. That’s a lot of failure.
While sharing your failures can be empowering, enlightening and engaging, it is not for every person, however. Or every failure.
Stefan sums up one of the concerns of unfiltered sharing of failure: “It takes courage, but it also takes privilege.” She notes that, when she wrote about her CV of Failures, she stopped short of sharing specific details. Even now, when she has reached the holy grail of academia – a tenured position – and reveals that it took her 13 years to complete her undergraduate university degree, she still keeps some details private.
“Now that I have a permanent contract, it’s fine for me to fail at times,” says Stefan. “It’s still not nice but I know I can try again.” Stefan, who no longer fully updates her CV of Failures but still keeps lists of research grant applications and their outcomes, emphasises that she is acutely aware that not all can share from this same position. “That would be different if I was on a three-year contract.”
GROWTH FROM FAILURE
Roche agrees. “Being able to embrace and publicise your failure requires a degree of efficacy and resourcing that many people don’t have easy access to,” she says.
Lewis-Fitzgerald puts this in a day-to-day context for anyone else who is aiming for a book contract. “What about all the people who are working multiple jobs or don’t have a partner’s income to rely on — how many great books don’t get made because of that?” she asks. “I think about that all the time.”
Failure is essential not just in high-achieving activities but in any new learning. It is theorised that optimum learning exists when failure is experienced around 15 per cent of the time. Nature Communications journal recently tested ‘The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimum learning’ in artificial neural networks used in artificial intelligence. Lead author, Assistant Professor Robert Wilson from the University of Arizona, thinks the model instinctively fits for human learning also. “This definitely aligns with my teaching philosophy,” he says.
One surprising benefit of embracing failure, for Stefan, is that it has helped lessen her sense of ‘imposter phenomenon’. First identified in the 1970s by Dr Pauline Clance, a psychologist working with high-achieving women, imposter phenomenon includes a feeling that achievements are undeserved. “Imposter syndrome is basically this idea that you don’t really belong,” Stefan describes, “that everybody else is more qualified and that, at some point, people will find out what kind of fraud you are and kick you out.” Though it was counterintuitive, she found that keeping track of her failures helped. “I think it’s because you see that the things you have achieved are not just a fluke or a lucky coincidence, but the result of a lot of hard work,” she says.
When writing about failure, ironies abound. Wilson notes that his research paper was rejected twice before publication. Stefan laughs about the fact that the highest impact-factor journal publication of her entire career has resulted from writing about failure. Failure even helped this article, as it was substantially drafted while the initial planned interview with Dr Roche failed to happen.
Should we therefore aim for failure? Lewis-Fitzgerald’s tracking of her rejections from publishers came close to this, but she clarifies that, even though she expected failures along her journey to publication, she wasn’t aiming to sabotage herself. Lewis-Fitzgerald started her spreadsheet after reading about another writer setting a goal for 100 rejections in a year. “Oooh, that’s fun!” is her recollection of how she felt after reading this. “But the idea was not to get 100 rejections, but to make 100 submissions and not get discouraged along the way.”
Hearing Lewis-Fitzgerald speak about her spreadsheet elicits the image of her failures as stepping stones across a picturesque stream that she needed to cross in order to reach her goal (and reach it, she did; Modern Mending, a combination of clothing repair inspo and how-to, was published by Affirm Press earlier this year).
But, perhaps you are someone for whom failure feels more akin to walking on wobbly and slippery stepping stones across a raging river so wide that you can hardly see the other side and where each step comes with the real risk of plunging into water and drowning?
If you are, take heart that you are far from alone. J.K. Rowling’s speech of 2008 made it clear that this was the case for her. “I am not going to ... tell you that failure is fun,” she said. “That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of ‘fairytale resolution’.”
Roche agrees that embracing your failure doesn’t mean that it won’t hurt or result in a genuine setback. But she is clear that changing how we approach failure is possible. “Please don’t quote me as saying that failure is great. Because failure hurts. Our brains are malleable so the more we engage connections, the stronger they get,” she says, linking this conversation to theories of neuroplasticity, hope, resilience and growth mindsets.
REFLECTING AND ACCEPTING
She encourages individuals to not ignore the sadness, anger and devastation that can result from failure. Instead, she suggests giving yourself time and permission to experience these feelings, including seeking professional support as needed. Once the emotions have lessened, moving to a state of reflection about, and acceptance of, the failure is possible. “When we can start to think about failure with acceptance,” she says, “we can understand it in context and start to plan the path onwards.”
There is no doubt that the hardest failures to cope with, in both our work and personal lives, are those that are unexpected and hit hard. Roche applauds the approach of embracing more expected failures – like Lewis-Fitzgerald’s book proposal rejections and Roche’s applications for grants that are well-known for their low success rates – as a way of developing resilience.
Still, if the idea of keeping a CV of Failures or a Rejection Scorecard is more likely to lead to hyperventilation than celebration, hold onto these final words from Roche: “Recognise that failure is inherent in success and the way we perceive that failure can change over time.”
“DR STEFAN REVEALS IT TOOK 13 YEARS TO FINISH HER UNI DEGREE.”