A balanced view of failure#

You’ve probably heard it a hundred times: failure is the secret to success. Fall down seven times, get up eight. Every mistake is a lesson. It’s an encouraging idea, and there’s real truth in it. But taken literally it’s wrong in a way that matters, because failure does not teach you anything by itself. Most of the time, left to its own devices, failure teaches you very little at all. What you need is a balanced view, both of the fear that holds you back and of the failure you’re so afraid of.

Use the balanced model of fear#

While many self-help books treat fear negatively, fear often has a rightful place. Fear is usually a warning from your body or brain that you may be putting yourself in danger. Often though we let it control our activities too much. What you need is a balance between too little fear and too much fear. You could look at fear along a scale:

What is a contingency?

A contingency is an action to handle a potential future issue. For example, you plan to meet a friend at a restaurant at 7pm. Your friend is often late, so a contingency might be to call them from your cell phone at 7:15 if they haven’t arrived. You may need to take some action now to help you use that contingency. For example, you need to take your cell phone with you. Planning for contingencies involves thinking ahead for possible issues that may arise, and working out what you would do if those issues do arise. You might then do some preparation now to help reduce the effect of those issues.

The balanced model means you accept the dual nature of fear. If you have too little fear you may take too many unnecessary risks. You may put yourself and others around you at risk of hardship, injury or worse. Too much fear can be just as devastating though. It can result in a life not lived. You are too afraid to do anything worthwhile. I believe the ideal position on the scale is somewhere near the middle. You take time to understand risks, plan contingencies (see side bar), and then do what you want to do.

The same person can be at different positions along the line for different activities. For example, someone who is careful in business may be reckless when driving. Being too aware of risk in one area of your life may lead you to be less so in other areas. Be aware of where you are along the scale for each major area of your life, and look for differences like these.

Failure can teach you, but it doesn’t do it by itself#

Here’s the part the cheery slogans leave out. People are surprisingly bad at learning from failure. In a clever set of experiments, researchers had people answer questions and then gave some of them only failure feedback (“you got it wrong”) and others only success feedback (“you got it right”). You’d expect the failure group to learn more, because failure carries the same information as success and more besides. They learned less. They remembered less, and they did worse on a later test, even though all they had to do was flip a wrong answer to the right one (Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach, 2019).

Why? Because failure stings. It’s a threat to your ego, and the natural reaction is to look away. People tune out, stop paying attention, and protect their sense of themselves rather than mine the experience for the lesson. The failure was sitting right there, full of useful information, and they simply didn’t take it in.

So the real version isn’t “failure teaches you.” It’s this: failure can teach you, but only if you stay in the room with it. That means three things have to be present.

• Framing. You have to treat the failure as information about the attempt, not a verdict on you. “That approach didn’t work” keeps you curious. “I’m hopeless at this” sends you straight for the exit. The work you did earlier on changing your self-talk is what keeps the ego threat low enough that you can actually look.

• Feedback. You need to know specifically what went wrong, not just that it went wrong. A red cross with no explanation tells you almost nothing you can use. Seek out the detail, from an instructor, a log, a recording, or your own frank review.

• Reflection. You have to stop and process it. What happened, why, and what you’ll do differently. Failure that flies past unexamined just becomes a habit you repeat. This is exactly what the review technique in the eNquire step is for.

Success teaches too#

There’s a flip side worth saying out loud, because the “failure is everything” mindset quietly devalues the times things go right. Success is also a teacher, and often a gentler, faster one. When something works, it carries information too, about what to keep doing, and it does so without the ego sting that makes failure so easy to ignore. The flight student who greases a landing learns something real about the approach that worked.

The balanced view, then, is the same shape as the balanced model of fear. Failure isn’t the villain, but it isn’t a magic ingredient either. It’s one source of learning among several, useful precisely to the degree that you frame it well, get good feedback, and take the time to reflect. Lean on your successes for confidence and your failures for correction, and refuse to be so afraid of failing that you never gather either.

Assertions for a balanced approach#

Your inner dialogue strongly influences your approach to risk and fear. Assertions are a good way to change that dialogue. These are some assertions I use for a balanced approach to fear and failure:

• I work to understand risks before I take them.

• I make the most of the life I have, and this involves taking risks.

• I plan contingencies for the risks I take.

• I work to understand what might be unreasonable fears.

• Failure can teach me, so I stay with it instead of looking away.

• I learn from my mistakes, and I learn from what goes right.

The takeaway: don’t worship failure and don’t run from it. Aim for the middle of the fear scale, then turn each setback into a lesson on purpose, by framing it as information, chasing down real feedback, and reflecting before you move on. That’s how failure earns its reputation as a teacher, and it never does it on its own.