Learning to Love Failure

There are two things that stop us from acting on big ideas: hard work and the “what if I fail?” factor. But what if failure *was* the goal? And what’s wrong with failing, anyway?

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Ever have a crazy idea? A big, I-probably-shouldn’t-even-bother, whopper of an idea?

Something like, oh, I don’t know…starting a business? Changing careers? Running a workshop? Writing a book in a month? Writing a book at all?

There are so many big, fantastic, amazing ideas happening every second of every day – and lots of small ones, too. You might even have one right now. (Or several.)

There are, generally speaking, two things that will stop us from acting on those ideas: work and the “what if I fail?” factor.

There’s nothing you can do about work. Good ideas, big and small, take work, action, effort, and sweat. You can’t create something from nothing. (Well, unless you’re a theoretical physicist.)

Once you’ve made peace with, even committed to, the work, though, it’s “oh, s**t!” time. This is the place where fears – fear of failure, primarily, but also of rejection – pop up and get in the way. These little buggers keep us all from doing so very much.

Rejection Therapy

What is failure and rejection were the desired outcome? What if the only thing you had to do was fail? There’s a game out there called “Rejection Therapy” that aims to help you understand how “rejection can be the catalyst for personal success and business domination”. I haven’t played it, and it definitely appears to be based toward corporate sales guys in suits, but I love the everloving heck out of the concept. why?

Failure changes things. For the better.

Failing to Teach

A year or so ago, as I was winding my way out of one business and into another, I spent a goodly number of days hemming and hawing and whining about wanting to get back to teaching; I was an education major, and a corporate trainer, but the last thing I taught was a technical class for pharmaceutical reps, and that was years before. Even if I could figure out what to teach, I pondered, I didn’t yet have the reach or audience to get students, my teaching skills were rusty, and, well, what if it was awful? What if no one came?

And so, in what was probably an effort to get me to shut up, but was really a fantastic business move for me, my sweetie dared me. “Launch a course a month,” she said, “and I’ll do all the laundry.”

Sold!

Not just on the laundry part, either.

That dare was my rejection therapy. It gave me a reason to move forward. It didn’t matter if I was a bad teacher. It didn’t matter if no one came. My goal suddenly wasn’t to teach an awesome class a month (alhtough I certainly tried), or to teach a fullly-attended class a month (some were, some weren’t), but to teach a class a month. Period.

Falling in Love with Failure

Failure, just like success, is not universal. We create our own little individual failure points throughout our world: if my course doesn’t sell out, it’s a failure; if I burn dinner, I’m a failure; if I don’t make enough money to support my family doing this specific thing, my business is a failure; if I don’t finish this book by Thursday, I’m a failure; if I burn dinner, I’ve failed as a cook. And so on.

Turned on their head, though, these failure points are the challenges we set for ourselves. They are our own rejection therapy. They are the pushes that keep us moving. And they rarely live up to the beasts we make them out to be.

And if you fail, if you collide with an arbitrary failure point? At least you’ve taken action, a step toward a goal. Collect the data, see what you can learn from it, check in with yourself, and take your next step.

Because you might not be where you wanted to be, or where you intended to go, but you’re not where you were when you started. And that’s progress, baby.

So go ahead, try to fail.

I dare ya.

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Hi! I’m Dani. I’m a writer, teacher, business coach, and signal-booster, and I’m on a mission to help you make your business more awesome, more successful, and more you. (With tea. Tea is always good.)

Join me for resources, wicked wisdom, and other good things at daninelson.com!