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It is natural to want to avoid failure. It’s natural to find failure painful. Unfortunately, that leads us to want to avoid it at all costs. And when we avoid failure in our lives, we also avoid discovery and accomplishment. And yes, even success. The only way to succeed in any endeavor worth trying is to be willing to fail along the way. To fail as a novice, as you’re learning the new skills. To fail when you’re on the leading edge of discovery, and you’re trying things that haven’t been tried before. We have to embrace those kinds of failures because that’s where great advances and even joy come from.
Three Archetypes of Failure
In order to explain why failure brings value and why all of us need to get comfortable with failure so we can get that value, it’s essential to understand the different kinds of failure. I identify three archetypes of failure, and only one of them is what I’ll call the good kind. The good kind of failure, I call it intelligent failure. An intelligent failure is the right kind of wrong. It’s where new knowledge and discovery come from. Intelligent failures are essentially the results of an experiment. An experiment where you don’t yet know for sure what the result will be. Those kinds of failures are the kind that we absolutely need to learn to love and learn from.
The other two types, it’s okay if you don’t fall in love with them, they are the kind that we need to learn how to prevent as often as possible. The first kind: basic failure. A basic failure is an undesired outcome that is caused by a single factor, usually a human error. Sometimes that failure is small. You put the milk in the cupboard instead of the refrigerator, no big deal. Sometimes it’s enormous. A Citibank employee accidentally transfers $900 million and ultimately can’t get it back. Big, huge failure. Simple mistake.
The last kind of failure is complex failures. Complex failures are those that happen because of an unfortunate lining up of multiple factors that come together in just the wrong way to produce a breakdown. Supply-chain breakdowns during a global pandemic would be an example of complex failures. There’s not one cause. There’s not one mistake. There’s multiple factors, from weather to absentee workers to you name it, that all came together and led to the breakdown. They’re not always preventable, but we can always strive to prevent them. And more often than not, we can catch and correct those small deviations in time to prevent the bigger, more consequential failure.
Rising to the Top of Your Game
There are some people who I call elite failure practitioners. An elite failure practitioner is someone who is really striving to be at the very top of their game, and in order to be at the top of their game, they recognize there will be failures along the way. And these would be leading scientists or inventors or celebrity chefs or product designers, people who must experiment for a living. These are the people who experience more failures than successes in an average day or week at work, and yet they’re willing to tolerate those experiences of failure because of the successes that they allow them to produce.
So they understand that there’s a very real likelihood that they will be wrong. They know that failure is part of the journey towards success, and so they learn. They train themselves to value and welcome the failures because there is always knowledge there, and, importantly, new knowledge.
Choosing Learning Over Knowing
When you fail, it’s natural to feel bad, and it’s also natural to have a spontaneous thought that that really shouldn’t have happened and you’re upset that it did. Pause, reframe. Because the reality is, we all make mistakes. That’s how we learn and grow, and it’s okay. We learn from each undesired thing that happens, and it helps us take the next steps where we might do better or try it a different way next time.
Reframing is such an important skill, and in new territory, it’s absolutely vital to reframe any failure from something bad to something actually, literally, truly good. A failure in new territory is quite simply information. It’s the knowledge you needed to figure out what the next step is. Mastering the science of failing well starts with self-awareness and choosing learning over knowing, being willing to say, “I don’t know. I’m going to try. I’m going to see what happens.” It’s such a powerful way to approach life and work.