F*** is a Four Letter Word
“Fail” is a four letter word but somehow it’s trending. “You must out-fail the competition”, says Stephen Bartlett in Diary of a CEO. ”Build, measure, learn”, says Eric Rees in The Lean Start-up. People share their “failure resumes” on LinkedIn. And one of my personal favourites, Spanx founder and self-made billionaire Sara Blakely regularly asks “How did you fail today?” at the dinner table – it’s cause for celebration.
My dinner time conversation tends to run more towards “if you eat one more spoonful of peas you can have ice-cream”. But I do love the concept of not just accepting that we will fail sometimes, but actively seeking it out and celebrating it as the best way to learn. As a recovering perfectionist, it’s a far cry from my old approach of “never ever fuck anything up, ever”. To be honest, it’s still a battle for me not to translate “I failed” as “I’m a failure”.
Most of us probably don’t relish being way outside our comfort zone, making mistakes publicly, and feeling incompetent. But these things help us succeed, apparently. So how do we navigate this tension?
FA** the Unknowns
For me, it helps to go back to my start-up roots. Start-ups distill a lot about life. You’re operating in uncertainty. You’re there for a purpose. It’s an adventure, with some high highs and low lows ahead of you.
In this kind of environment, we try to know the knowable things as quickly as possible. Read everything, talk to everyone, and learn from best practice in every relevant field. How do we raise capital? How do we attract A-players? How do we design the technical infrastructure for a direct-to-consumer software product? These are things other people have figured out that we can learn from.
Then, we spend the majority of our energy on the unknown things. The things that no-one has ever figured out. What is the big opportunity? What makes us unique? Which part of the market should we pursue?
These are big complex questions with no right answers – and therefore no wrong answers. And that’s where the freedom to experiment comes in. Some of our experiments will fail – actually, many of them. And some of them will succeed. But all of the little failures will earn us more “units of knowledge” – and knowledge is power, especially for those of us who want to be pioneers and build something new and important.
FAI* Because Science
Remember Year 7 Science? Obviously the pivotal moment was earning our bunsen burner licenses and being allowed to burn things at school (just me?) But hopefully the scientific method also rings a bell: design a specific question you want to answer, conduct an experiment, and analyse the results.
At work we often put pressure on ourselves to get things right all the time, but treating aspects of our work like experiments keeps our minds open to a range of outcomes that will either support our hypotheses, or teach us something! Anything can be conducted like an experiment – from “A/B testing” an email or campaign idea (i.e. trying two options and seeing which works better) to setting up a website front to test real demand for a new product.
FAIL at the Personal Stuff
At the moment I’m failing on multiple fronts at the same time; everything from parenting and looking after my wellbeing to finding product market fit for a social enterprise, building my freelance business, and putting myself out there in professional community groups. I’ve made so many mistakes, most of them in front of other people.
But to take a leaf from start-up culture, we all need to be pioneers of our own career and life and explorers of the “unknowns” in front of us. Only we can discover what works for us, and what doesn’t work. When we truly take on this approach, failure is inevitable. But so is growth. Humility. Authenticity. And the freedom to focus on our purpose, not what other people think success looks like.
So, how will you fail today? And remember, if you have one more spoonful of failure, you can have ice-cream for dessert.
xo Steph