How to Let Failure Define You
When I moved to Canada one of the first things I noticed was how different television ads are here. Canadian ads are just plain boring compared to the ones I grew up with in South Africa. Need proof? Just google any “But with Aromat!” commercial, the Vodacom Meerkat, or the Nando’s Last Dictator Standing ad.
Despite my shade (and obvious bias), there is one particular commercial I watched here in Canada that I won’t forget: Mazda’s “A Driver’s Life” ad for the 2016 Miata. The ad itself isn’t anything special, but it’s the opening lines that are especially memorable:
“Sixteen, wide-eyed. Driver’s license took two tries.”
I couldn’t tell you the number of times my brother and I have referenced those lines to each other. I already had my license by the time the ad first aired (only took one try, ah thank you very much), but my brother was still a year away from his shot at freedom. He was a little less lucky in his attempts when his turn came around and it ultimately took him four tries before he got his license. Each time he arrived home after his first, second, and third attempts he would break the bad news, but we would say:
“Sixteen, wide-eyed. Driver’s license took two tries.”
Two obviously turned into three which then turned into four, but the message remained the same. You don’t always get what you want the first time around. Sometimes, you just have to try again.
Failure is not fun. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. The feeling of dedicating your time and effort into something only to come up short is very disheartening. While we can’t control the emotion and pain that comes with failure, we can control how we respond to it.
If at first you don’t succeed…
There are two achievements I am particularly proud of in my life so far: first, being elected to the Board of Directors for a not-for-profit organization that I have volunteered with for the past 6 years, and second, being selected to represent Canadian youth as a delegate at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund 2018 Annual Meetings. Most people who know me know of both of these achievements and how proud I am of them, but what they don’t know is how both of these stories started with rejection.
I was elected to the Board in January 2019. But that was my second kick at the can. A year prior I had run for the same position in the same organization and lost. A few months later I came across an opportunity to attend the Youth 7 Summit in Ottawa, Canada, and the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) Forum in Paris, France. If you don’t know what these events are (as I didn’t at the time), they are gatherings of world leaders, industry experts, academics and diplomats to discuss global challenges relevant to our time. Seemed legit. Laptop and application forms opened, application questions were answered, personal statement video was recorded, and boom: application submitted (with minutes to spare).
As you may have guessed, I wasn’t selected.
Why do I share these stories? Because even though I’m no longer a teenager, I still resonate with that Mazda commercial. Though I did pass my driver’s test my first go-round, I have had my fair share of failures and rejections. Sometimes it takes two (or three, or four) tries to get your driver’s license.
It is easy to notice and judge each other based on our successes, but behind each of those successes is likely a failure or two that should be equally recognized and celebrated. While I am proud of both of my achievements, I am just as proud of the attempts that led up to them.
Fuck Up and Fail Forward
The idea of learning from failure is not new. In design thinking, the concepts of rapid prototyping and iteration have been around since the 1900s and even earlier. These tools are fundamentally rooted in the acceptance of failure; you try, fail, learn, improve, and try again, then rinse and repeat the process as quickly and as many times as possible. While failures in the design process are very much controlled, failures in life are often anything but which is why it is so easy to view them negatively. Just as rapid prototyping and iterating are steps in the process to develop your final product, failure in life is itself an opportunity to prototype and iterate. Except in life you are the product.
Failure is an opportunity to learn and grow. But like I said, learning from failure is not new. What is new, though, is the idea of celebrating our failures and yelling them from the rooftops. Over the past 10 years, organizations like FuckUp Night and Fail Forward have emerged to help individuals and organizations rethink their relationships with failure and learn to celebrate them. Though experiencing failure is demoralizing, learning from failure and overcoming it is empowering. It is important to tell stories of failure, whether or not they end in clear success. Celebrating failure recognizes the integral role it plays in life and the opportunities it presents for improvement.
“That was my greatest achievement: to overcome that.”
If you ask LeBron James what is the greatest achievement of his NBA career so far, he will tell you it’s the 2011 NBA Finals. Not because he won; LeBron’s Miami Heat lost in 6 games against the underdog Dallas Mavericks after he had arguably the worst playoff series of his career. Lebron didn’t choose his 8 consecutive NBA Finals appearances, or the back-to-back championships he won following the 2011 Finals, or even the 2016 championship he won in Cleveland that ended his hometown’s 52-year championship drought. He chose his loss to Dallas, the biggest loss of his career. “That was my greatest achievement,” he said. “To overcome that.”
As much as our successes define us, I personally identify with my failures just as much. Failure has the ability to cripple, weaken, and demoralize, but when viewed from the right perspective it can also strengthen, uplift, and empower. Failure does not define you. How you respond to it does.
