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According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, failure means a lack of success.[2] The logical assumption that follows is that you’re only successful when you reach your end goal. In other words, the process doesn’t matter. It’s spelled out in black or white terms: it’s either success or it’s failure. This disempowering definition is one of the primary reasons why people fear and despise failure.
You could argue that it’s all just semantics, but language shapes your behavior, so it’s important to use the right, empowering words. You might consider the following few paragraphs a bit esoteric, but please bear with me and you’ll probably start seeing failure in a new light.
If you face a difficult problem and you tell yourself, “I don’t know how to deal with it,” you’ll think of reasons why you can’t do it — and not potential solutions. Your brain acts on your instructions, and it’s the words you use that steer your thinking process. How likely are you to solve the problem if you’re wasting energy coming up with excuses?
If instead you tell yourself, “Okay, let’s find a way to figure it out,” you’ll think of potential solutions and probably solve the problem. Same problem, different words, different outcome.
Let’s illustrate this with a quick example:
John and Kate want to start a business. Both come from the same background and have the same exact resources at their disposal.
John says: “If only I had money, I could start a business.” His disempowering vocabulary “if only” fine-tunes his brain to come up with further excuses why he can’t start a business.
Instead of telling herself “if only,” Kate says: “I don’t have money, and this means I need to figure out how to bootstrap my business.” Her brain receives high-quality instructions and she comes up with several ideas to start a business on a shoestring. Same problem, different words, different outcome.
It’s not an unproven theory, discovered by some Martin Meadows guy. The concept that language has a big impact on our life is one of the staples of performance coach Tony Robbins’ effective coaching process and has been proven to work with hundreds of thousands of people all over the world[3].
The basic premise of this concept is also the foundation of Nonviolent Communication, a communication process developed by Marshall Rosenberg[4], in which replacing one word with another can make the difference between an unproductive fight and successful communication.
Scientific research also suggests that words are powerful enough to induce a behavioral change. In one study, calling a carrot an “X-ray Vision Carrot” increased consumption of this vegetable by 16% among elementary school students[5]. And this effect isn’t limited to gullible children alone — adults offered the choice in a cafeteria will rate the taste of “Traditional Cajun Red Beans With Rice” more favorably than the taste of “Red Beans With Rice” or compliment “Grandma’s Zucchini Cookies” more than those described simply as “Zucchini Cookies,” even though they’re eating the exact same dish[6].
As powerful as our brains are, words can fool them — and you can use this phenomenon to your benefit.
I hope that by now you’re convinced that words matter on a deeper level than you think. Let’s change your definition of failure to something more useful. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language defines failure as: “The condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends.[7]”
If we play with this definition a little, we can develop a more empowering way to think about failure. This definition talks about the “desired end.” If, instead of making your desired end solely about the final success, but instead define it as learning, you’ll never again fail in the traditional sense. —You’ll also start considering failure your friend, and not a reason to give up.
If you focus on the learning experience, you’ll realize how flawed the common definitions of failure and success are. You build success through trial and error. It’s the failure — and the lessons it provides — that turn you into a winner, not avoiding it. Sticking to what’s known, easy and comfortable is a sure-fire way to not reach your goals.
When a shy man chats up a woman and she rejects him, did he fail or succeed? To an average person watching the interaction, the man has been rejected. He failed. But did he really?
If his intention is to overcome shyness — or in other words, to learn something — the outcome of his approach doesn’t matter. His desired end is to learn how to become more confident. He was brave enough to step outside his comfort zone and talk. Viewed in terms of his purpose, a rejection might have been an even better outcome than getting a woman’s phone number, because repeatedly getting rejected helps him get used to it.
In rock climbing — my favorite sport — you learn more on a difficult route you can’t finish than on an easy route that you climb effortlessly. It helps you pinpoint weaknesses you need to address and uncovers your true character. Dealing with difficulties and the fear of a potential fall also sharpens your mental game and helps you become a better climber overall.
If your desired end is learning, is taking a fall a failure or success? Is it really better to climb an easy route and succeed (with no learning process) or fall off a difficult one, but learn something new and become a better climber?
In martial arts, for training purposes, losing can be more valuable than winning. When you lose against a more able partner, you discover your technical shortcomings. When you crush a weak rival, there’s little to no learning. Is getting beaten a failure if you learned something new you otherwise wouldn’t have learned?
As Josh Waitzkin notes in his book The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, “Great ones are willing to get burned time and again as they sharpen their swords in the fire.”[8]
Beating weak opponents, crushing easy problems, or doing things well within your comfort zone might make you look good in the eyes of other people, but it’s challenging yourself that leads to improvement and long-lasting success.
Challenging yourself and persevering in spite of difficulties isn’t easy by any means, and we’ll spend more time with this topic in a later chapter. For now, make a mental note that failure and success are two sides of the same coin, and one cannot exist without the other.
EMPOWERING STORY #1: TURIA PITT
Turia Pitt was as successful as a 24-year old person could be. She didn’t lack in anything: she was in a happy relationship, worked as a mining engineer for one of the world’s largest metals and mining corporations, and in addition to her intelligence, she was also one of the Miss Earth Australia contestants.
In September 2011, she was invited to participate in a local ultramarathon through Western Australia’s Kimberley region. Originally, she didn’t plan to participate because of the expensive entry fee, but when the organizers waived it to have some locals participating in the race, she instantly agreed.
Turia had been running for 19 kilometers (12 miles) when she entered a gorge that forever changed her life. Due to an oversight on the part of the race organizers, she found herself in the middle of a bushfire, facing a wall of flames with no escape route.
She suffered burns to 65% of her body, lost fingers from her left hand and her thumb from the right hand. A surgeon later commented that she’d been “literally cooked” down to the bone.[9]
Multiple surgeries later, she still undergoes on average three surgeries a year and needs many more to remove the fire scars.
Fortunately, despite the horrific event and ongoing painful recovery, her spirit hasn’t been broken. In 2014, she trekked a part of the Great Wall of China and raised close to $200,000 for an organization that provides free reconstructive surgery to poorer parts of the world. She continued her career in mining, received a Master’s degree in mining engineering, studied for an MBA, and became a sought-out motivational speaker.
In 2015, she got engaged to her long-term partner, who had supported her throughout the years. In May 2016, she completed her first Ironman Australia competition, and just five months later completed the Ironman World Championship at Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.
As she said before departing for her trek on the Great Wall of China, “The fire has turned my life upside down; I don't want it to have any more impact. It was a couple of seconds. What’s that compared to a lifetime?”[10]
When asked in an interview if she ever has bad days, she replied, “Of course. I go through dark times. But everyone has bad days. You can let experiences destroy you or mould you. I choose to let them mould me.”[11]
American happiness researcher Shawn Achor points out in his book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, that we become more successful when we are happier and more positive[12].
He provides an example of doctors, who, when put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis, show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors who are in a neutral state. In addition to that, they make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster.
Achor also writes that optimistic salespeople outsell the pessimistic ones by 56 percent and students primed to feel happy before taking math tests far outperform their “neutral” peers.
Exhibiting positivity is also one of the keys to handle failure in a constructive way and not allow it to destroy your prior achievements.
If you’ve ever cheated on a diet, you probably experienced the “Screw it! I messed up” thoughts. The slip-up might not have been a big issue in itself, but succumbing to these thoughts and consequently going on a full-blown cheat week ruined your prior progress. If instead you had reassured yourself it was just a small slip-up, that positive attitude would help you avoid further, more lasting negative consequences.
Neurologist Judy Willis notes in her article on re-wiring a burned-out brain that “The brain literally rewires to be more efficient in conducting information through the circuits that are most frequently activated. As you internalize your thwarted efforts to achieve your goals and interpret them as personal failure, your self-doubt and stress activate and strengthen your brain’s involuntary, reactive neural networks. As these circuits become the automatic go-to networks, the brain is less successful in problem-solving and emotional control. When problems arise that previously would have been evaluated by the higher brain’s reasoning, the dominant networks in the lower brain usurp control.”[13]
In other words, dwelling on your failure reinforces it and makes you less effective at dealing with future failures. Turning the failure into a lesson (remember our definition of failure?) will help you to reinforce a positive coping mechanism.
I’d been trying to get down to a single digit body fat percentage for years. Each time I commenced a new workout and nutrition plan, I failed within several weeks or months upon realizing that not much had changed in my physique. To say it was frustrating would be an understatement.
After several failed attempts, I came up with a genius idea that maybe — just maybe — it would be a good idea to learn my lessons and try a completely different approach. I know, sometimes I’m not a particularly bright guy.
Upon investigating the reasons behind my past failures, I realized that I’d been making three cardinal mistakes: 1) I exercised at the gym despite not really enjoying it (hence my workouts weren’t as effective as they could be); 2) I craved too quick results (which made my nutrition plan unsustainable); and 3) my motivation was too weak — enjoying a great physique wasn’t a good enough reason to persist when I felt frustrated.
I heeded the lessons my failures taught me by replacing boring, frustrating bodybuilding exercises with fun, passion-filled rock climbing and krav maga – an Israeli self-defense system – workouts.
I refined my diet to deliver slow, but sustainable results that aren’t spectacular on a week-to-week basis, but lead to extraordinary results on a month-to-month basis.
Lastly, I uncovered a stronger reason why I wanted to accomplish my goal: dropping body fat tremendously improved my climbing performance. I linked my weight loss to one of the biggest passions in my life, and suddenly everything was easier to handle.
In the end, the lessons I learned from past failures delivered a big impact on my general well-being and helped me get closer to reaching my goal.
EXERCISE #1: LEARN FROM FAILURE
The next time you fail, resist the temptation to let anger, frustration, discouragement or self-guilt make you give up. Give yourself time to process the negative emotions, and then make a list of the lessons you’ve learned from not reaching your desired outcome.
This will help you develop a positive mechanism for coping with failure. When you transform a failure into a list of lessons, you’ll empower yourself by thinking in terms of possible ideas for improvement instead of poisoning yourself with negativity.
You already know that words are powerful. I hope that now you will consider failure a valuable tool, and not a useless, frustrating and discouraging event.
You can further reframe how you think about failure by using metaphors. A word or a phrase that represents one thing while talking about another is a sneaky way to unconsciously change how you think about something.
Thinking of a certain problem as a crushing burden makes you associate it with an ordeal. You feel like you’re too weak to get it off your shoulders and breathe freely again. How are you supposed to overcome it when merely thinking about it makes you physically shrink?
Replacing this metaphor with something more empowering — for example, thinking of a problem like a barbell that you want to lift off the ground to build muscle and get stronger — will shift your attitude to a more positive one.
Here are three metaphors you can use to further drive the point home that failure is necessary and useful:
If you imagine the process of working on your goal as navigating a maze, each failure teaches you what doesn’t work. One by one, you’re eliminating ineffective approaches. When you adopt this metaphor, failure won’t mean the end. It will mean a new beginning.
It’s close to impossible to escape a maze without getting yourself into a dead end or two. Isn’t it interesting that some people will pay to enter a corn field maze and have the time of their lives trying to get out, but give up immediately when they get lost in the exact same—albeit metaphorical—maze when working on their goals?
Michelangelo once said that “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”[14]
When you adapt this metaphor, each failure will fuel your curiosity to discover the statue inside the stone you’re carving. The process of carving this metaphorical stone doesn’t merely shape the stone; it also shapes the sculptor. Each failure improves your carving skills and as you are slowly discovering the sculpture inside the stone you’re carving, you are also uncovering a better sculptor in yourself.
One of my favorite metaphors for failure is that it’s a filter. The longer something takes and the more patience it requires, the more people it filters out along the way. Difficult goals are often easier to reach because there’s less competition if patience plays a big role in their accomplishment.
The fact that some things are hard filters out those who don’t have enough resolve and rewards those who do; —it also blesses the latter—not only with success, but also immense personal growth and increased mental resilience.
When looking at failure from this perspective, you should be grateful that your goal is so difficult to achieve because it ensures that you need to go through a long, hard process that will make you a better person.
There are many stories of people who won the lottery only to lose it all, if not to end up worse off than they were before their “lucky” day. That’s what happens when you score an easy win you didn’t earn — you get the event (success), —but you don’t get the process that shapes you to become a person who actually deserves it and knows how to handle it.
Compare those “lucky” winners with people who spend long years toiling away at their businesses, dealing with one failure after another, and pushing through. When they finally build a successful business and start earning a lot of money, they’ll be infinitely less likely to lose it all. Precisely because it wasn’t easy to achieve, now they’ll be able to enjoy their success for decades to come.
Think of it as treating the symptoms vs. eliminating the root cause. An easy win — such as winning the lottery or undergoing a weight loss surgery — is treating the symptoms. You aren’t changing as a person. Your habits stay the same and will drag you back to where you started. When you eliminate the root cause — a lack of positive habits, inaction, procrastination, or a lack of self-discipline — you’ll be forever changed and your world will transform according to your internal changes.
Each time you get angry at how difficult accomplishing your goal is, remind yourself that it’s a tool through which you’ll gain the right for your success. If all were given to you when you asked, you wouldn’t appreciate it and wouldn’t become a person who knows how to handle such a reward. In the end, you would probably squander it. Let the filter work its magic and shape you like a blacksmith forges a sword.
1. If you want to handle failure in a constructive way, change your definition of it. If you have a disempowering definition of failure, such as “failure is a lack of success”, you’ll avoid it as much as you can, and thus never achieve the ultimate objective you’re after — personal growth. Words have power, and changing the definitions you use will change your behavior.
2. A more useful definition of failure is that you fail when you fail to learn something from an event. If you consistently step outside your comfort zone and try new things, you’ll always learn something new — and that will empower you and help you achieve your long-term goals.
3. It’s you who controls how much of an impact a failure will have on your performance and future progress. Resist the temptation to feel angry, frustrated, discouraged, or guilty when you fail. Instead, make a list of lessons you’ve learned from not reaching your desired outcome. If you repeatedly make a big deal of every tiny slip-up, you’ll fine-tune your brain to react in this way for every future problem. It’s a troubling behavior, because humans perform best in a positive state, not when dwelling on past mistakes, criticizing oneself or feeling guilty.
4. You can use metaphors to further change your beliefs about failure. Three powerful metaphors about failure you can use are: thinking of failure in terms of navigating a maze, in which each failure helps you get closer to the end, looking at failure as a sculpting tool, and considering failure a filter that eliminates people who aren’t dedicated enough.
