There may be no better representation of failure than when a project you’re working on explodes spectacularly in front of an audience of thousands. When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk does this – as his company probably did at the end of his Launch of the spacecraft’s prototype on Wednesday– the agony of failure becomes tactile in flaming towers and clouds of burning shards broadcasting live around the world.
Musk is a billionaire industrialist and a fiery public figure, famous for his resounding success in various sectors. And yet he often fails, occasionally even seeing his ambitions to build rockets that will take humans to Mars literally on fire.
He is not the only successful tycoon or icon who occasionally sinks into the pit of failure. Thomas Edison is known for recognizing your close relationship with failure; for years, JD Salinger’s literary genius was not praised, as his tales were continually rejected by the New Yorker; Michael Jordan didn’t make it to the college basketball team on the first try.
We don’t always need to follow the tips of wealthy tycoon ventures – especially those with reputations as dubious as Musk’s—Or from visionary inventors or legendary athletes. There is a lesson to be learned from the stumbling blocks overcome by both the hugely successful and the anonymous. Failure haunts us all, no matter how many triumphs we enjoy in life. But failure can be instructive. There are often important lessons, if not glimpses of success, within our failures – consider the fact that before it explodes, the SpaceX rocket did something unprecedented– but to recognize this fact means to rethink the very concept of what it means to fail.
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Failure is a constant, so don’t worry about it
Family clichés about failure abound, no matter the context, but especially at work. The notion of “failing early and often” exists to encourage younger workers who are struggling to gain a foothold in their jobs. “Embracing failure” applies readily to entrepreneurs, who are betting on their first attempts to build something with staying power. The suggestion is that embracing failure should be a momentary step towards an idealized notion of lasting success.
But in life, things are rarely so simple. According to Ross McCammon, author of the corporate etiquette guide Works well with others, success comes along with failure more often than you might expect. As he says, however, this is really a good thing – if failure can be interpreted as an actionable dilemma.
“Failure is not a dead thing,” he tells Lifehacker. “It is a living thing and you can draw energy from it. But the longer you wait to think about it, the more calcified you get. And then it’s just a big dead thing that happened, instead of a vital part of your present and future. ”
A careful approach is the key to recognizing how missteps can help you in the short and long term. McCammon emphasizes a more proactive approach, in which you recognize failures as they arise and honestly discuss them with colleagues and bosses.
He says:
Recognizing success within failure is best done immediately after you recognize what is happening as failure. Or maybe even during. I think that failing early and failing often works as a philosophy, as long as you also evaluate early and evaluate often and disseminate your assessments to your colleagues and even your boss.
Not everyone can afford to have such accommodating work environments and friendly and understanding bosses and colleagues. But you can avoid the black cloud of failure in your own mind by expanding your perspective on what it means to fail.
Accept that your career will not be linear
“I was released from almost every job I had due to budgets or reductions,” says Sean Abrams, editor of the Ask Men website. As a 29-year-old Millennial writer, Abrams is no stranger to the turmoil that affects the digital media industry, not to mention the flow that has permeated the broader job market since the Great Recession of 2008. For those in his position, failure often it is born out of circumstances beyond your control – an acknowledgment of which can provide a valuable perspective.
“Sometimes the factors that led to your failure don’t really have much to do with you. You only have the short side of the stick, ”says Abrams.
Labeling an unsuccessful venture as failure is too narrow to have much instructive value. McCammon suggests that “we reject the idea of phases like failure and success and play a longer game”, in which we accept that the arcs of our careers will be anything but predictable.
He tells Lifehacker:
As we progress in our career, we think of it first as a kind of line and a line that must be growing all the time. Of course, that is not what happens. It does not always go up and sometimes it goes to the side and curls up. Perhaps you have tried a new career for a few years, perhaps you have been unemployed for a while. Careers are not linear. And I think it’s a useful context for assessing failure.
One way to reshape failure, especially in a culture that so excessively pays homage to success, is to think of it in less harsh terms. Instead of insisting on the drastic consequences of a perceived failure, think of setbacks as instructive mistakes. Mistakes are normal and excusable and happen regularly. People who make mistakes are usually not defined by them – and McCammon thinks you should take your own without apologizing:
“Any successful person – young or old – is good at making mistakes openly … you could argue that a career is just a series of mistakes that you navigate and turn into successes.”
With this frame of mind, finding success within your supposed failures will not be difficult at all.