Success & failure

When I was in my 20’s, I used to print out and tape quotes to the back of my bedroom door to help reinforce new and different ways of thinking. 

I still do this, but my fiancé frowns upon taping paper to doors, so now I just use the white board in my office instead.

One of the most powerful shifts I made during “the era of the door quotes” related to how I thought about failure (and more generally doing things I wasn’t good at).

There’s a lot of great quotes on this topic, but one in particular stands above the rest. But in order to really understand it, we have to understand a few things about failure first.

When it comes to the belief that we aren’t good at something - whether in the sphere of careers, relationships, or anywhere else – there tends to be one of two dynamics at play:

1. We are inaccurately assessing ourselves due to unconscious mental filters

2. We are accurately assessing ourselves and we do indeed suck

Replacing unconscious mental filters

Cognitive behavioral psychologists refer to our core beliefs as “mental filters that guide how we interpret events.”

The belief that one is “a failure” or “not good enough at something” is one of the single most common negative core beliefs in the general population.

When this is one of your core beliefs, you only let in evidence that supports the belief, unconsciously filtering out any evidence to the contrary.

This can be quite detrimental, keeping you in a negative feedback loop of your own creation.

For example, let’s say you believe you “aren’t any good at giving presentations" at work.

i.   Despite your belief, you are convinced to do a big presentation at work

ii.  Most of the presentation goes great, but you make a few small mistakes

iii. You either totally ignore where you did great or attribute it to external factors: they were easy parts, you got lucky, you had a lot of help

iv. You identify strongly with the mistakes, even if they were the result of external factors, and view your entire performance as poor

v.   Due to your perceived “poor performance,” you reinforce your negative belief that you're bad at presenting

vi.  Your negative belief causes you to avoid presentation opportunities in the future

vii. Your skills deteriorate from avoidance and start to match your negative belief in reality

Thankfully, you can rewrite negative beliefs and replace unconscious mental filters with more accurate ones. The process is relatively straightforward:

1. Catalog the evidence supporting your negative belief (ideally in writing)

2. Catalog evidence that could support an alternative, more positive belief (ideally in writing)

It’s important to be thorough when looking for alternative evidence. In many cases, there will be a lot more than you might expect. 

By continuously countering negative beliefs with positive evidence, over time you can learn to develop a more balanced perspective. 

And in some cases, you will find your belief wasn’t just imbalanced, but was entirely opposite the truth!

What if you are actually bad?

I used to get really hung up on this one.

Because sometimes, I would find that I was indeed underestimating my abilities, improve my confidence as a result, and experience a virtuous cycle of continued growth.

But sometimes, no matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise, I couldn’t hide from the truth: I was actually bad at the thing in question. Sometimes really bad.

Embracing a “growth mindset” in these situations is important, no doubt. And I recommend you do.

But even if you fully embrace the belief that improvement is possible with continued practice, some things are still uncomfortable to practice. Especially those where you receive immediate, public feedback:

• Giving a presentation at work

• Writing something on the internet

• Lifting weights while at a crowded gym

• Striking up a conversation with a stranger

It is natural to want to avoid things like this, even if you intellectually understand that practice is  necessary in order to improve.

Enter my favorite quote, by the late great Bruce Lee:

“Don’t fear failure. Not failure, but low aim is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.”

As Bruce Lee so elegantly alludes to here, the solution is that you must put more value on the attempt itself than you do on avoiding failure.

Instead of focusing on avoiding failure, you focus on avoiding “low aim.”

You don’t just see failure as a necessity, you see it as “glorious.” Because it means you’ve made the attempt.

• Bombed your presentation at work? Glorious. It means you gave one.

• Got ridiculed for a shitty article online? Glorious. It means you wrote one.

• Looked pathetic next to the regulars at the gym. Glorious. It means you went.

• Got laughed at trying to talk to a stranger. Glorious. It means you put yourself out there.

From this perspective, confidence doesn’t come from your ability, it comes from your willingness to act in spite of your ability.

This is how you get into a virtuous cycle that can quickly catapult you higher and higher.

Let’s return to our presentation example. 

Now, it doesn’t really matter whether you believe you are actually good or actually bad at giving presentations because you believe “Volunteering to present and giving it my best shot is more important than how it ends up going." Just by trying, you've already won in your mind. With this belief:

i.   You embrace opportunities to present

ii.  Through repetition, you inevitably improve

iii. As you improve, confidence comes easier

iv. You end up getting more opportunities to present

And you can create this same virtuous cycle in any area of your life where you're looking to improve.

In summary, you want to be sure you’re seeing reality clearly and giving yourself credit where it’s deserved. But at the end of the day, what matters most is that you associate victory with the act of trying, regardless of your ability. That’s where true glory resides.