The Importance of Failure

Everybody fails.

Jamie Siminoff pitched DoorBot, a wifi-enabled home security camera, to SharkTank and failed to receive funding from the group. Years later he sold Ring aka DoorBot to Amazon for more than $1 billion.

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

Walt Disney was fired from The Kansas City Star because he supposedly “lacked imagination and had no good ideas?”

J.K. Rowling had Harry Potter rejected by 12 publishers. Stephen King had Carrie rejected by 30.

Oprah Winfrey lost one of her first jobs in TV when the producer said she was “unfit for television.”

Failure leads to success. Or as Winston Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” No matter where you are in your professional journey, understanding the importance of failure is the quickest way to move one step closer to success.

Learning from past failure

Even if we agree about the importance of failure, that doesn’t mean we like to experience it, let alone acknowledge it. But knowing when and how we’ve failed in the past is key to succeeding in the future. Reflect on your self, your team, and your company before moving past the failure. Ask yourself: why did I fail?

Researchers from The Harvard Business Review even have a spectrum of reasons for failure that they encourage leaders to go through following any sort of failure.

So taking stock of past failures is a great way to start learning. Does it sound fun? Honestly, no. Is it worth it? Great leaders will say yes. Because great leaders know that the past doesn’t have to define them—and it can actually help their future.

Growing through current failure

If you’re reading this because you feel like you’re in the middle of failure, bravo. Acknowledging where you are (and that something is going wrong) isn’t easy. But it’s worth it.

In fact, The National Library of Medicine states that, “Accepting negative emotional experiences predicts decreased negative affect and depressive symptoms.” So dealing with failure, even as it happens, can be a helpful and positive experience.

The first step to growth is simple: control the controllables. Is there any part of your current experience that’s under your control? Start there. So much of failure happens outside the bounds of things we can change, but if we want to experience success now (instead of waiting to learn from failure later), we can begin by altering the things we can control. And letting go of the things we can’t.

Preparing for future failure

Here’s the beauty of life: every day is a fresh start, a new chance. You’re going to fail again. But with that, you have a decision to make. Endure the failure as best you can and hope to learn from it once you’ve made it to the other side.

Or start over—again and again.

There’s a system of running a marathon that involves multiple starting lines. As with any race, every marathon has a starting line and a finish line. The starting line is a magical place—there’s a buzz from the shared communal nervous energy. It’s the only place where you can meet people who are happily waiting their turn to use a porta-potty.

But once a race starts, a person’s energy begins to resemble an upside-down bell curve. The excitement at the starting line fades as the race goes on and gets harder, hits an all-time low around the middle, then picks back up and crescendos at the finish line.

But there’s a way to keep that happy porta-potty energy for a little while longer. It starts with setting multiple starting lines for yourself. Every mile marker, starting line. Every aid station, starting line. Certain landmarks or the peaks of hills, starting lines. Suddenly a massive daunting race can become a bunch of bite-size achievable races. Now you can win.

This isn’t a new idea. But the magic in this idea is not the way new starting lines make goals achievable—it’s how they change the way we view the process.

Multiple starting lines still create their own inverted bell curves, but the valleys aren’t as deep. Suddenly, a disastrous mile or two doesn’t derail the whole race. Instead, you can start over at the next mile marker and begin again with the infinite potential that a starting line entails—we’re talking happy porta-potty energy.

That’s what it looks like to understand the importance of failure and have the ability to learn and grow for it. There’s a reason Thomas Edison famously said, “I didn't fail 1000 times. The lightbulb was an invention with 1000 steps.” Failure, whether you’re in the midst of it, recovering from it, or scared of experiencing it in the future, is inevitable. And it creates the building blocks with which a successful life is built.

It’s not easy, but hey, if it was, everyone would do it. And you’re not everyone.