I’ve relied for a while on the notion that failure is a good thing. We learn from it! I still remember the giddy feeling I had at a coach training session where we were instructed to run happily around a meeting room with post-its on our foreheads that said I Failed Today!
Suddenly, it was OK to let the pot boil dry, to forget to change the oil, to let the remains of that red onion disintegrate in the vegetable bin. Somehow, it would make me a better person. I would learn from it.
So it was with huge regret that I read an article the other day that said none of this was true. According to Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, a motivation/achievement researcher, we learn more from our successes. We tend to block out the whole failure thing. It’s only other people who benefit from our failures because they can actually take them in.
Reportedly, this is universally true – among American adults and adults from other countries, in foreign language study, in romantic relationships and even when people got paid to learn from failure.
Phooey.
Not that I’m discounting my contribution to helping other people succeed. I suppose that’s a nice silver lining. But I was really counting on my failures to take ME to the next level.
The idea of having to succeed in order to become more successful myself is, well, intimidating.
I immediately started surveying the past week to see if I could find any successes. I was coming up pretty empty until I dumbed down the definition. Then I found two.
I figured out how – without getting up on a ladder – to hang twine from a grape arbor so my clematis would climb on it. Want to know how? Just tie a weight to the end of the string and sling it over top. Ha! I am Heloise.
And after fervent Googling and many failures, I finally figured out that my wireless printer was not connecting to my laptop because the printer’s IP address had spontaneously changed via something called APIPA.
Granted, each of these victories contains a seed of failure. Friends have since informed me that while the string weight was clever, clematis is even more clever and will always find a way to climb an arbor.
Also, I must confess that I still couldn’t print because I didn’t yet know how to change the IP address on my printer back or keep this from happening again. But by the time the weekend was over, I had narrowed down the problem for my tech person to tackle and was not one of those clients who simply arrives with Blah, blah, blah. My printer won’t connect.
I am confessing these shortfalls because somehow othersmay be able to learn from them.
While I am at it, I may as well move on to a more completesurvey of what else I have failed at this week, so that I can somehow make the world a better place. For others.
We could start with my water bottle. Twice this week, I’ve failed to close the top all the way – first ruining one of those cute and overpriced cube boxes of facial tissues in the front seat of my car and then flooding the entire lunch sack I was using to transport it. Obviously, the research was right. I didn’t learn a thing. But now others will always have dry and reliable water bottles.
Also, I apparently failed – again – to hit the final button required to modify my curbside pickup order, which I only noticed when the groceries arrived – again – in two bags rather than five and I only had half my order. I would like to think this was some sort of systemic failure rather than my own so that I could somehow learn from it. But alas. It probably was not.
So with great reluctance, I’m going to admit that the research is probably right, especially where it suggests it’s more fruitful to focus on success than failure.
So now I’m on it – looking for success, even though it will probably require a great deal more creativity and redefinition than failure ever has. I did, for example, get out of bed this morning. Also brushed my teeth, made coffee, emptied the dishwasher. All without a hitch.
Success is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. And now that I’m looking for it, I intend to find it everywhere.
Copyright 2021 Pat Snyder
