There may be no better representation of failure than when a project you are working on explodes spectacularly in front of thousands of audiences. When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk does it – as his company probably did right at its end The launch of the Starship prototype on Wednesday—The agony of failure is made tactile in flame towers and burning shrapnel clouds, broadcast live around the world.
Musk is a billionaire industrialist and a skilled public figure, famous for his resounding success in many industries. And yet he still often fails, occasionally even seeing his ambitions to build rockets to transport people to Mars, literally on fire.
He is not the only successful tycoon or icon who occasionally capsizes in the pits of failure. Thomas Edison is famous for recognition its close relationship with failure; for years, JD Salinger’s literary genius remained untouched, as his short stories were continually rejected by the New Yorker; Michael Jordan did not make his high school basketball team on the first try.
We must not always take clues from the efforts of rich tycoons – especially those with reputations as checkered as Musk’s—Or from visionary inventors or legendary athletes. There is a lesson to be learned from the obstacles overcome by both immense and anonymous success. Failure haunts us all, no matter how many triumphs we enjoy throughout our lives. But failure can be instructive. There are often important lessons, if not even flashes of success, in our failures – keep in mind that before it exploded, that SpaceX rocket he did something unprecedented—But appreciating this fact means rethinking the very concept of what it means to fail.
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Failure is a constant, so don’t dwell on it
Known clichés about failure abound regardless of context, but especially in work. The notion of “failing early and often” exists to encourage younger workers who are struggling to gain a foothold in their jobs. The “embrace of failure” is easily applied to entrepreneurs, who take gambling in the first attempts to build something with maintenance power. The suggestion is that your embrace of failure should be a momentary step toward an idealized notion of lasting success.
But in life, things are rarely quite cut and dry. According to Ross McCammon, author of the corporate etiquette guide Works well with others, success comes in tandem with failure more often than you might expect. As he says, however, this is actually a good thing – if failure can be interpreted as a dilemma that can be acted upon.
“Failure is not a dead end,” he told Lifehacker. “It’s a living thing and you can extract energy from it. But the longer you wait to think about it, the more calcified it becomes. 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 essential to recognizing how wrong steps can help you in the short and long term. McCammon emphasizes a more proactive approach, in which you acknowledge failures as they come and discuss them honestly with colleagues and bosses.
He says:
Recognizing success in failure is best done immediately after you have recognized what is happening as a failure. Or maybe even in time. I think that early failure and failure often work as a philosophy, as long as you evaluate early and evaluate often and make your assessments known to colleagues and even your boss.
Not everyone has the luxury of such affluent jobs and nice, understanding bosses and colleagues. But you can avoid the black cloud of failure in your own mind, broadening your perspective on what it means to fail.
Accept that your career will not be linear
“I was given up almost all the jobs I had because of budgets or cuts,” says Sean Abrams, editor of Ask Men. As a 29-year-old millennial writer, Abrams is no stranger to the riots affecting the digital media industry, not to mention the flow of the broader labor market since the Great Recession of 2008. In his position, failure often arises from circumstances beyond their control – a recognition of them can provide a valuable perspective.
“Sometimes, the factors that led you to failure don’t really have much to do with you. You just have the short end of the stick, ”says Abrams.
Labeling a failed business as a failure is too reductive to have much instructional value. McCammon suggests that we “reject the idea of phases such as failure and success and play a longer game,” in which we accept that the arc of our career will only be predictable.
He tells Lifehacker:
As we move in our careers, we think of it first as a kind of line and a line that should grow all the time. Of course, that’s not what happens. It does not always go upwards and sometimes goes to the side and turns on itself. Maybe you’ve tried a new career for a few years, maybe you’ve been unemployed for a while. Careers are not linear. And I think this is a useful context for assessing failure.
One way to reformulate failure, especially in a culture that lions so much success, is to think of it in less severe terms. Rather than thinking about the drastic consequences of a perceived failure, think of setbacks as instructive mistakes. Mistakes are normal and excusable and happen regularly. Wrong people aren’t usually defined by them – and McCammon thinks you should own your own without excuses:
“What any successful person – young or old – does is make mistakes without excuses … you could argue that a career is just a series of mistakes that you navigate and turn into successes.”
With this in mind, finding success in your supposed failures will not be difficult at all.