Three great ways to fail miserably
Where's the fun in getting it right first time?
This the first in a three-part series of articles about dealing with fear:
Part 1: Three great ways to fail miserably
Part 2: Fail, change your approach, succeed
Part 3: Fail, but find a new direction
Fail fast! Learn from your mistakes!
We’re always being told these days that it’s important to get it wrong, to take responsibility for your errors and to be able to move forwards from them.
And it’s certainly the case that if you want to be able to create, to innovate, to solve new problems, then you need to create an environment in which people feel comfortable taking chances and trying things out, without fear of failing.
But at a personal level, it’s better to not make mistakes, right? As in, it’s better to actually get stuff right, be successful, to not waste money, throw good money after bad, to put something out there that’s really not good enough. Surely?
No-one likes to fail. It’s demoralising and disappointing. You can feel like you’ve wasted time, money and effort.
Ultimately, making mistakes is fine, as long as you subsequently get it right and become successful. Otherwise, all you’ve done is get it wrong and you haven’t achieved what you set out to do.
This week I’m going to be publishing three articles that look at how you can fail and come back from it better, stronger and more successful.
In fact, failing isn’t usually failing – that’s the point; Perhaps if you lost your job, your home, your family, your money, your reputation, your friends, your stuff and you still didn’t learn anything, and would do exactly the same thing if you had your time again tomorrow then yes, maybe that’s a proper failure.
But I bet that’s not where you are. If you’ve just had a failure, you’ve probably learnt something, got some new perspectives and have a better idea now of what it is you really want to achieve.
Usually when we talk about failure we mean that we didn’t achieve a goal that we’d set out to achieve, or fell short of a particular standard. Maybe we did everything we should or could have done but came up short, due to circumstance, competition or luck.
Or maybe we just didn’t try hard enough and we got what we deserved, or at least we got out what we put in. These harsh truths can be hard to accept, but you cant move on without them.
Failing, at some point, is inevitable. If you go through life trying to avoid failure, you will be over-cautious, miss opportunities and ultimately, learn nothing. And if you think you’ve never failed, you’re kidding yourself. It means you’re not looking at how you could be doing better and ultimately, you’ll be missing opportunities to grow in future.
There are three main ways in which you can fail. In other words, there are three ways in which you can learn from failure, and three main ways in which you can look at your situation and move forwards again. These are:
Fail so you can do the same thing better next time;
Fail so you can pivot and have success in something related;
Fail so you can get new perspective and take yourself in a different, better direction.
And that means that one of three things were wrong to begin with – your goal, your approach to the goal, or the amount of effort you dedicated to the goal. It could even be all three.
If you didn’t put enough in, you can learn to do the same thing better next time.
If you had the right goal but the wrong approach, you can find another way to achieve that goal.
And if your goal was the wrong one, you can find a whole new direction to take.
For each of these, it’s essential to be honest with yourself about what went wrong (specifically, what you did wrong). If you’re not honest with yourself, if you try and swerve responsibility, you won’t be able to get to the heart of the problem and won’t know how you need to change.
And, as the old adage goes, the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Once you understand which type of failure you are going through, you can start to put it right and follow your new direction, approach or level of commitment.
What’s key is to take chances, try new things, with the expectation of a certain level of failure at some point, and then choose how you respond to that situation.
I’m going to share some of my own biggest failures to illustrate these three ways forward, and how I’ve dealt with the inevitable disappointments. First up, failing to do it better next time.
In 2019 I ran my first ultramarathon. Or, at least, I attempted to. This was a hllly 100km race in the middle of England in the middle of summer. I had trained well, I had researched what it would be like and I had recce’d about half of the course over some months.
In June of this year, ultrarunner Sophie Power set a new record for running across Ireland.
“Chasing the record wasn’t what kept me going,” Power posted on Instagram post-run. “It was just the hope that other women and girls might see me striving and reconsider their own limits. Get a sprinkling of confidence to take on a challenge. Try something they might fail at to gain strength throughout their lives.” (quote from Canadian Running magazine)
My race didn’t go well. In something that turned out to be a blueprint for future races, I went off too fast, got disproportionately pleased with how far up the field I was, and then the wheels fell off. It happened to be the hottest day of the year (32C) – if you’re reading that as a seasoned ultra veteran, that might not seem that bad, but it finished me off.
Ambulances by the trail drove away broken athletes who had also failed to take account of the relentless sun.
At 57km, finding that I couldn’t even break into a jog on the downhills any more, I quit and got a lift to the next aid station.
I learned a lot that day and even though I felt exhausted for a week, it was only a day or two before I was thinking how I might have done better, or might be able to do better next time. Here are some of the things I identified:
Get fitter – sounds obvious, but I thought that marathon fit was ultramarathon fit. It’s not.
Use poles (for the hills – then you take some of the strain on your arms and shoulders)
Eat properly and continuously throughout (rather than having a huge breakfast then feeling sick for the whole race)
Slow down!
Manage your own expectations and have a plan B, C, D for when it inevitably isn’t going how you want it to…
Be in the moment and just keep moving forwards (rather than sitting by the side of the trail, sobbing or feeling sorry for myself).
Pain is normal. This was a big one. Once I started watching more videos and reading books about ultrarunning I realised that that level of suffering (and I thought, terminal injury) was completely normal in a longer race. Even the winners of 100-mile race will regularly throw up by the side of the trail, and/or think they can’t go on. But they do.
I realised with hindsight that what I thought was a relentless grind to the brink of death was actually a bit half-arsed and I should really have pushed myself a lot harder. I should have trained more, learned more, gone deeper on the day. Instead I wallowed in self-pity and convinced myself I was moments from death.
Quite a few of these lessons have turned out to have wider application in life. I’m more inclined to have a plan B rather than just assuming that the best will happen (optimism good, blind optimism bad).
I’ve stopped assuming that everyone else is having an easy ride and that it’s only me getting a hard time. I’ve been more ready to ask people what mistakes they’ve made and what lessons they’ve learnt, in any walk of life. And they’re always happy to share it (because people like to help, and they like talking about themselves even more).
Hardly anyone gets their first ultra right, and even that turned out to be a useful lesson for other situations, including writing. It’s tempting to just assume that everyone knows how to do this stuff, and that’s just not necessarily the case. Almost anyone you know who has clear success in a field, has taken far longer to get there than you thought.
You’re only seeing the success, not the hazardous, demoralising, winding route they took to get there. They failed along the way, probably many times.
And if there is someone who just got it right first time, they are an outlier, not a blueprint. The internet is full of people taking their success and selling it as a formula for guaranteed repeatable success.
I’ve done three more ultras since then and in May of this year was the first time (at the fourth attempt) that I managed to put all of those lessons into practice at the same time. I started slowly. I had a plan B. I had a big cheese sandwich after an hour. I kept taking on calories even when I didn’t want them. And I finished the 42-mile race in a reasonable time.
And it still wasn’t perfect. It hurt. It took longer than I expected or hoped. But at least I knew it was a fair reflection of what I could actually do if it goes to plan. And better than that was the satisfaction of knowing that I’d got it wrong previously, found a solution and made it work. I’ve since been able to share some of those lessons with newer runners to help them as well.
I was listening to Adharanand Finn’s podcast this week - just a year ago he abandoned his dream of running the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 because he didn’t feel he could do it. Just a couple of weeks later he had announced he was going to run around Ireland and last week he finished his new 1400-mile odyssey. Fail, learn, go again, succeed.
Although of course, learning from other people’s mistakes is nowhere near as valuable as from your own. You can’t feel another person’s mistakes and you almost can’t believe them unless you’ve been there and lived it yourself.
“Been down, but I’ve come back brighter” – reef, Come Back Brighter
So if you’ve just failed (or are failing) and you are sure you want to do the same thing better next time, start with a real, honest look at what lessons you can learn. And focus on you – what did you get wrong, where did you underestimate the challenge, or where could you have done more, or better?