I’ve seen that look in their eyes when people start telling me how they want to quit their jobs and start their own businesses, or tackle a life-long dream, but something is holding them back. It’s the look of frustration mixed with self-doubt and fear. Mostly fear of failure and fear of the unknown.

I haven’t conquered either of the two big fears, but I’m slowly catching on to the idea that failure is just a normal, integral part of life. In fact, repeated failures and eventual successes are the reasons humankind make any progress at all. Like Tom Watson, the president of IBM observed, ‘If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.’ The more comfortable a society is with failure, the faster is its collective learning.

Failure could even make you brighter. According to creativity and learning guru Tony Buzan, learning to learn is the real achievement. Many people won’t try a new challenge until they’ve done all their homework and are 100% sure that they will succeed. But your brain is designed for a more experimental and explorative model. Remember how we all learned to walk, talk, ride a bicycle…? Buzan uses an acronym for the steps your brain has to take on the road to success, TEFCAS:

1. Trial – this is every attempt to achieve a goal (depending on the goal you may need only a few or thousands of these).

2. Event – this is the memorable moment when you miss the ball, go blank in front of your audience or is unable to deliver on a promise to a client.

3. Feedback – When the Event happens, your brain receives information through your five senses and intuition.

4. Check – Your brain will consciously and automatically check how you have performed in relation to your goal.

5. Adjust – You will then make the necessary adjustments for your next trial, always keeping your goal in mind.

6. Success – Reaching your goal after repeating steps 1 to 5 as many times as needed. But watch out, during the learning process your brain usually doesn’t judge your goal. If it is something negative like harming yourself, it will still view reaching that goal as success. Therefore be careful how you formulate your goals.

When Buzan asked people why they practise or repeatedly try something, 99% of the response sounded like this: ‘To get better with every attempt’. But this is an unrealistic expectation and not the way human learning works. Skill or performance does not develop like an up-ward sloping line – even the world’s greatest sport people have days when they just can’t do anything right. Thomas Edison failed 9 000 times before he perfected the light bulb. If you expect to progress all the time, the first Event that looks like regression could make you quit on the spot. Prepare for ups and downs and endless displays of no-progress. Some you win, some you lose.

I recently heard a striking definition of an expert: ‘someone who has already made all the mistakes possible in a particular industry’. Meant as a joke, but there is some truth in the statement. While it’s a great achievement to reach success after only one trial, a few mistakes or even a major failure could equip you better for future projects – and leave you with more stories to tell.

While it makes sense to have your big failures early in life when they’re usually cheaper and you’ve got more recovery time left, failures later in life can also be a blessing in disguise. In his famous Stanford address, Steve Jobs has the following to say about getting fired from Apple 10 years after starting the business from scratch, ‘(It) was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.’

J.K. Rowling’s recent speech to Harvard graduates echoes that of Jobs. ‘Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.’

I don’t have the same glamorous story, but I can identify with Rowling. I had always believed that I could do anything until I collided head-on with Mathematical Statistics 314. I did so poorly in the exam that they wouldn’t even allow me to re-write. As a result, I never qualified as the professional, admired, well-paid actuary which I thought I was on the road of becoming. It was painful and a severe blow to the self-esteem at the time, but it prompted me to start and complete my humanities degree a few years later. I don’t even want to imagine missing out on topics like satire and subversion, post-colonial thought, advertising, editorial practice, eco-criticism, gender studies, African prose, magic realism – an intoxicating journey through the world of ideas.

Yes, sometimes repetitive failure embitters people and that will always be one of life’s great tragedies. But I suspect that a little bit of failure now and then actually turns most people into nicer, more empathetic human beings. Every trial, every leap of faith may not always allow us to touch our goals, but it keeps us in the hero-zero relay called human existence. We’re on track.

Tags: failure, hero to zero, JK Rowling, Learning, Self-actualisation, Steve Jobs, success, TEFCAS, Tony Buzan

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Learning, Personal development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.