Learning from failures

How to tweek your life to use failures to succeed

I am reading Scott Adam’s ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life’. One of the most important messages in this book is ‘always use failures to reorient your life for success.

Its easier said than understood. Its easy to feign understanding it and its extremely difficult to implement it in your life. I believe the author has done a great job in explaining. I would like to break it down to the following steps.

When have you failed?

Most important part of the whole cycle is that you fail to understand when have you failed? Life is a continuous process and it never stops. So the clear signal of failure is never there. There are symptoms and indirect evidence. However its very late to realize that the we have failed. If something is failing the first attempt is to salvage and don’t allow it to fail. People who have anticipated failure early in the work and developed parameters / benchmarks to identify failure, are in a better position to cope with failure. So its important to understand both aspects what will success and what will failure mean in terms of benchmarks. Quantitative analysis come handy but should not be the sole criteria. Sometimes in businesses one can foresee the failure and change strategy well before the impending failure.

Once it has been determined that the project has failed, efforts should be made to minimize loss and move on.

How to get out of the victim mindset?

‘Stop digging’ is the best way of getting out of a hole. The victim mindset has the tendency to keep the person in a comfort zone, where one can blame everything and its soothing. There is no way anyone can really help except the person himself. Every kind of failure leads to victim mindset, it could be severe or mild or manageable but its always there.

Stop digging means to stop thinking about the failure all the time. It can be achieved by engaging in other healthy activities like sports, exercise or prayer/ meditation. Yes, binge watching Netflix does not help rather makes the situation worse by adding the guilt of wasting time.

What lessons to learn from failure?

Another aspect of failure is that it clouds judgement, especially when one has done a lot of effort not to allow failure. Even after the failure one is still under the impression that either it can be salvaged or rebuilt. There is no harm in rebuilding after a catastrophic failure but it should be done with a clear mind. Since its very hard to accept failure, learning from failures is a very complicated task. The easiest way to gauging the lessons is to write down a journal of how the endeavour panned out over the years / months and how it spiraled towards failure. The journal will not be perfect in the first attempt (because of victim mindset described above), however one has to continue re-reading the journal and continuously trying to make it objective. Once we have reason(s) of failure hammered out it becomes easier to convert them to learning outcomes. These outcomes can then be used to invigorate the process and help in rebuilding / starting afresh.