The Psychology of Failure
The secret of failing your way to success.
Nobody likes failing. But, like it or not, failure is an unavoidable fact of life (especially when it comes to writing).
You’ll hear, “You’re gonna need a thick skin to make it in this industry,” which is true, but only sidesteps the underlying issue which isn’t that you need to develop an impervious armor immune to the negative effects of failure, but rather, that you need to learn how to absorb those failures, take them within yourself and hold them hostage in your gut. Digest that shit until you’ve sucked at the beneficial nutrients from it, and then, as is the way of life, take a dump.
In every failure there is an opportunity for growth.
Remember that. Plaster it to your walls. Nail a memo to the inside of your eyelid.
Whatever it takes, just never forget:
Success is determined by your ability to progress in the face of failure.
I’m not just talking about the big fails, either. The ones we all hear about like,
“My novel was rejected 32,145 times. I have the pink slips to prove it.”
Or,
“My novel was a commercial failure. 1 star reviews galore. Blaarg!”
Of course these fails sucks, but in order to fail big, you have to be in a position to fail big. Which, if you think about it, is better than being in a place where your failure doesn’t amount to jack-all.
So that’s the first thing we need to get through our heads:
To be in a position to fail epically, you have to work your ass off and sustain countless tiny failures.
Show Up and You’re Halfway There
One of the most pernicious of all failures (and the one plaguing humans since the dawn of time) is the failure to SHOW UP.
We’ve all heard it, right? 90% of closing the deal is just showing up.
The hardest part of writing a novel is just putting your ass in the chair.
Once you flop over that initial hurdle (and actually SHOW UP) you’re halfway to promised land.
People love to talk about how they’ve been planning to write a book for years now. And yet, of these people, how many actually go on to write a book?
Very, very, very few.
Why? Because they never show up.
It’s the same in all fields of human endeavor.
Got a friend who’s talked for years about opening an empanada stand?
How about a friend planning to learn a second language?
Anybody been talking about traveling the world for the last few decades?
Yeah, we all know these people. Hell, we are these people. And that’s the point.
Most of us will never accomplish anything of note because the fear of failure, procrastination, and whatever else keeps us from showing up and putting in the work.
But you aren’t one of those people. Right?
You’ve made it this far in the article, so that tells me you’re better than every other person in this world who didn’t (how’s that for a little mid-article pat on the back? Don’t ever say I didn’t do nothing for you). That tells me you have Grit.
Which is good, because a study conducted by psychologist Angela Ducksworth shows that grit is the single most important characteristic in determining an individual’s success later in life.
Grit
We’ll dive deep into grit in a future article, but for now, let’s at least define it.
Grit: “Positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or end state, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective.”
In short, this is a person highly motivated to grind out the work today, in order to succeed at some indeterminate date waaaaay off in the future.
Sounds kind of like a writer, huh?
Think about how many days in a row you must spend slamming your forehead into the keyboard before a novel comes out fully flushed and ready for mass consumption.
Now, you might be a more skilled conveyor of words than I, but my guess is it’s still going to take you at least a day or two to get the work done, and during that time, you’ll face a whole slew of new problems.
Let’s call these micro-failures.
Each one is inconsequential in isolation, but these things breed like rabbits, and if you’re not careful they will pile on you like a pack of wild children and drag you down beneath their combined, flailing bulk.
So, short of developing an iron clad force of will and a thick skin where nothing can get to our gushy innards, what are we to do?
Failure is Nature’s Secret Weapon
You are literally sitting in a Starbucks, sipping your soy mint frappuchino, playing on your Macbook Pro as a result of millions of years worth of evolution. (Okay, maybe you aren’t literally sitting there, but I’m using the form of literal which actually means metaphorically, so there.
Anyways, don’t get to thinking you’re better than the universe’s preferred method of guess-and-check (which involves such a staggering amount of failure I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it).
You, my friend, are the culmination of a millennia worth of failure.
Be humbled.
Be proud.
Be empowered.
Praise and it’s role in combating failure
Has anybody ever said to you,
“Wow, that was great. You did such a good job with that **insert whatever it was you did and probably sucked at**?”
You’re self-actualized enough to know when you suck at something, right?
I certainly hope so. So when somebody delivers false praise, it has the opposite effect and makes us feel like crap.
Now, this is a very obvious way praise can be misused, but the more dangerous (and way more prevalent) version is when an individual is praised for the wrong thing.
Science time: Carol Dweck (a crazy famous psychologist) did a study where they took two groups of children and administered an IQ test.
Then, upon receiving their scores, one group of children was praised for their intelligence:
“You did great, you must be really smart!”
While the other group was praised for their effort:
“You did great, you must have worked really hard!”
Then, in the next round, the kids were given the choice between two IQ tests. One, they were told, was “very easy, and you’ll surely do great on it”, while the other was, “much harder”.
A large percentage of the kids praised for intelligence chose the easier test, while an overwhelming percentage of the kids praised for effort chose the more difficult test.
In the third round, the kids were given a test significantly above their level. They would surely fail, but the researchers were interested less in the results than in the effort.
And sure enough, the kids praised for effort spent significantly longer on the test than their peers who were praised for ability (who quickly grew frustrated and gave up).
Last, the kids were given an IQ test on par with the very first one they took.
In this test, the kids initially praised for intelligence actually did worse while the kids praised for effort improved by a significant margin.
Okay, what’s this have to do with failure and writing stories and succeeding at life, or whatever it is we’re actually talking about here?
Everything!
The language we use to talk to ourselves plays an important role in whether we inevitably stick to a task long enough to eventually find success.
For example:
Writing a book is hard. It requires hard work, skill, and tenacity.
Now, if you hit a rough patch and start saying to yourself:
“I’m just not very talented at this.”
Then you’re negatively praising a fixed attribute such as skill.
If instead you were to praise yourself for “sticking with it”, well, now you’re reinforcing the positive mindset of, “I’m tenacious.”
Often when we look at our idols, we tell ourselves a story about how they got to where they are because they are just so skilled, or talented, or they have a great personality.
All sorts of fixed attributes.
But we overlook the fact that nobody has ever (well…maybe not ever. There are always exceptions. Kardashians, anybody?) gotten to a place of success without putting in a lot of time and energy and suffering through countless failures.
Fixate on that. Hold it in your mind’s eye, because that’s actually an incredibly powerful thing to be reminded of.
J.K. Rowling did not spring forth into the public consciousness one day out of the blue. She toiled for years on her craft, suffering in absolute obscurity, enduring one failure after another, until one day —
BOOM!
Harry Potter, baby.
And so you must channel this. You must embrace failure. Learn from it. Grow from it.
But whatever you do, never run from it.
Remember, every failure is an opportunity to grow. Now get out there and start failing.
