on incentivizing failure
tiny thoughts on loving the messy, noticing daily actions, and failing well.
“Life is not just FULL of mistakes. LIFE IS A SERIES OF MISTAKES.”
—Heather Havrilesky
The wonders:
My therapist once tried to convince me to make mistakes on purpose. She told me, for example, that I could write someone a letter with words misspelled. The point of the exercise was not to write a letter; the exercise was to fail, on purpose, and become more comfortable with mistakes. I told her I didn’t want to do the exercise.
Pithy sayings about failure are thrown around gratuitously. You never know if you’ll fail until you try it! Failure is the key to success! You don’t know what you can do until you’ve failed! And I used to think that if I ever started a company and ended up bankrupt, or wanted to become an Olympian athlete and didn’t qualify, I would be A-OK knowing that I had these apothegms to carry me through. But I never remember these phrases when I fail to keep up with habits. Or when I show up for people a little less than I would like. I fail to quell my anxiety. Why is self-forgiveness much harder for the tiny, daily minutiae?
“Understanding that you’ve been rehearsing and reliving the sensations of rejection and failure FOR YOUR ENTIRE LIFE makes actual rejection and failure feel almost…small and not that intimidating, almost a little bland! Far less scary than the oversized, fantastical-nightmare version that lives in your head!” - How to Set Yourself Up for Failure by Heather Havrilesky
The way we approach mini “failures”—like writing someone a letter with words misspelled—is key to unlocking how we approach failure in big events. I try to remember failure in the small stuff, often. So, to put this into practice, I try not to think about outcomes in terms of: I want to have roaring professional success! I want to be well-liked by everyone! I just want to live a happy, care-free life with my partner! I try to think in terms of mini, daily actions such as: I am okay with failing at coding data sets for years or I really like having emotional conversations with my partner or I want to show others vulnerable parts of myself. Being okay with these parts of the process—and even having hiccups and failures in these parts of the process—are the prerequisites for actually getting good at the big stuff.
The concept reminds me of a quote from David Brooks:
“You have to give to receive. You have to conquer a desire in order to get what you want. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.”
-TED Radio Hour Podcast: Can You Become A Better Person By Confronting Your Worst Self?
It’s paradoxical to think that letting go of the things we want can help us get closer to the things we seek. But the proper foundations of building a skyscraper are hard to see in the age of quick sound bites and social media.
I’m reminded of an excerpt from Mark Manson:
“If I ask you, ‘What do you want out of life?’ and you say something like, ‘I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,’ your response is so common and expected that it doesn’t really mean anything.
Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into the room.
Everybody wants that. It’s easy to want that.
A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, ‘What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?’ Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
[…]
People want to start their own business. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, the insane hours devoted to something that may earn absolutely nothing.
People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and starting blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.
What determines your success isn’t, “What do you want to enjoy?” The relevant question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The path to happiness is a path full of shitheaps and shame.
My new quest is to fall in love with the shitheaps and the shame of the things that I undertake. If things will be inevitably difficult, then I’d rather embrace it than avoid it. In fact, what if we made failure fun, and incentivized it? I think that this can teach people to value the process, rather than the outcome. Maybe some ideas:
Posting on social media about the failures and challenges along the way of a new endeavor. Often times, we only see the outcome of something, making results seem more ideal than the process.
“Failure treats” — where you treat yourself in the middle of a long process or after failing at something, the same way you normally would when you’re celebrating a success.
Showcasing and talking about failures more openly with others, especially when we are mentoring and coaching people.
Being more honest and transparent in the use of the word “struggle” as we go through something. I’ve started to say “I’m currently struggling through how to think about x” or “I’m struggling to understand y, but I’m in the process of working through it” to indicate that I’m in a temporary and liminal space between where I am and where I want to be.
And these are all things we can do on a personal level. On an institutional level, there are even more things that can be done like:
Giving funds to employees to experiment with new ideas, no matter the outcome. These are often called “venture funds” at institutions.
Asking about new things that employees tried and failed at, not just succeeded at, during every job review cycle (usually annual) and rewarding them for new things tried, even if failed.
Giving out awards in the classroom for people who have tried new things and failed (done by this professor!) because it means they have experimented and tried new things.
Keeping a “failure resume” which can show value of the things that were attempted, even if they didn’t come to full fruition in the way they were originally expected to.
It’s difficult to say just forget your failures and move on! Love them! Embrace them! This is why I’ve been holding on to this advice about making self-forgiveness a daily habit, and the way that this can make one more open to the things to come:
“If you’re self-aware, you discover over and over again that you’re misguided, you’re moody, you’re fallible. But if forgiving yourself for being who you are isn’t a part of your daily habit, you’ll be tempted to withdraw instead, to shrink away from the truth, to harden yourself against the world, to return to a defensive crouch instead of forging into new territory with an open heart.”
So if mini failures are a daily habit—by choice or inevitably by accident, then self-forgiveness should be a daily habit, too. This is part of what gives enough ease and lightness to move through the failures. It makes failure feel more like a curious experiment. What if we took it one step further and made failure into a joint party? Maybe we could all write each other letters and make lots of mistakes while writing them. That’s apparently where all the fun is.
Resources:
I’M OBSESSED WITH THIS ESSAY: ‘Everything I Do Has to Be Perfect!’
A print that I have hung up on my wall to see in the morning. (Nina is a gem and a friend of mine, AND she’s made the code “SAUMYA” if you want to buy your own beautiful print :))
Hattie Crisell on a writer’s responsibility to write authentically about pain: “If you’re writing a little made-up story about the worst stuff of life, you’d better get it right. You might have a reader who’s been through something similar, and you shouldn’t insult them with a ham-fisted and superficial account of it…If you’ve gone through chemotherapy, you don’t want to read about someone who experiences it as a minor inconvenience, written that way because the author thought it would be a good meet-cute between them and a sexy oncologist.”
“Revelations from Radical Empathy: Experiencing the True Face of Humanity”. A video that acutely captures the nuances of human emotion.
Community corner:
Friends, I’ve gotten better at email than texting, so here’s a hot take, if you want to discuss something, just drop me an email.