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A soul-crushing failure sucks. It’s disrespectful to trivialize anyone’s failure by saying that they can simply “snap out of it.” Right after a big failure, the last thing you want is somebody downplaying its significance in your life.
In some ways, failure is like coping with the loss of a loved one. Obviously, failure — no matter how crushing — can never match the suffering caused by losing a loved one, but the process of handling it shares some similarities with the process of dealing with grief.
The grieving process begins with denial, which is then followed by anger, bargaining (thinking about what you could have done to prevent the loss), depression, and acceptance.[39] These steps don’t actually happen in a linear fashion, as people can alternate between these stages — feel depressed, then angry, then wish that things were different, and then get angry again.
When you fail, you probably go numb, deny it, and suppress the emotions caused by it. Then you wonder what you could have done to avoid the failure. Then you lose hope that you’ll ever succeed, and ultimately, you accept what happened and move on.
The key to begin the process of bouncing back from failure is to accept that in the beginning of learning how to cope with it, you will feel numb and deny the negative emotions. Trying to suppress this stage will only prolong the process. If you can pull yourself together almost instantly, that’s great. If not, don’t rush it.
Let yourself feel the feelings that come with failure. Don’t be tough on yourself. Let other people know you might not radiate with happiness for a period of time while you’re trying to recover from your failure.
Each time my business failed, I went numb. I wondered how I could go on, now that yet another vehicle I thought would help me reach my goal was destroyed. In the beginning, this process took up to a couple of weeks, during which I’d be of little use to myself or anybody else.
I didn’t know any better, so I was unable to bounce back quickly. Over time, I trained myself to become better at handling this stage. I’d deny the failure for a day or two, and then go into anger, which I would then channel into newly found resolve.
Eventually, I stopped denying the failure, reduced the amount of time spent on fruitless anger or depression, and learned to accept that it had happened. That’s the good part about failing often: you get many opportunities to learn how to handle it, and you can quickly immunize yourself against it if you put in a conscious effort to do so.
When you get tired of feeling numb or in denial, you’ll be ready to move on and continue the process of coping. This always happens sooner or later because humans need variety and it’s impossible to stay in one emotional state forever. However, don’t rush it. I know it’s hard to feel hope, let alone even think about trying again, right after a failure, so give yourself the time necessary to move through all of the stages involved until you genuinely reach acceptance.
EMPOWERING STORY #7: ANNE WOJCICKI
Anne was a 23-year-old Yale graduate with a degree in biology when she got a job as a healthcare analyst on Wall Street.
To any typical 23-year-old, getting such a job would be a major success, but it wasn’t for Anne, because she had been frustrated that such a wealthy country as the United States couldn’t effectively provide even the most basic medical services to its citizens.
Anne became disillusioned with her Wall Street job when she attended an event, during which she heard insurers and accountants talking about how to “maximize the billing opportunity” when sick people sought care. That was when she realized that the system was never going to change from within.
As she commented during the SXSW festival, “Obesity is awesome from a Wall Street perspective. It’s not just one disease — there are all sorts of related diseases to profit from.”[40]
Several years into her lucrative career, she quit with the intention of enrolling in medical school. However, in the end, she decided to become a researcher.
Six years after quitting her Wall Street job, she channeled her disillusionment with the healthcare system into 23andMe, a privately held personal genomics and biotechnology company that she co-founded with Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza in 2006.
23andMe uses a simple saliva test to deliver ancestry reports and health-related components to consumers (at the time of writing this, the company offers health-related data to consumers in Canada and the United Kingdom and is working with the FDA to obtain regulatory approval to offer the same data in the US). It then uses this information for medical research to provide insight into why some people are more likely to get a disease than others and why people respond differently to disease treatment options and drugs.
Throughout the years, she met with adversity that came from all directions. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered 23andMe to discontinue offering its service due to the lack of regulatory approval. In the tech and science world dominated by men, Anne still encounters scientists who (as she said in her interview for the New York Times) are like, “Oh honey, women aren’t good at science.”[41] In her personal life, Anne went through a difficult divorce.
Despite all of that, Anne and the 23andMe team is on track to help millions of people all over the world discover how their genetics can influence their risk for certain diseases, find out if they’re a carrier for certain inherited conditions, and explore their genetic traits for everything from lactose intolerance to male pattern baldness. In addition to that, the acquired DNA information helps in researching some of the most common illnesses and disorders and, in the future, to develop drugs to treat them.
1. The first step to deal with a failure is to process it. Failure sucks, and it will sting. You’ll probably feel resigned or frustrated. You might feel numb and hopeless. It’s all normal, and you shouldn’t deny these feelings.
2. Human beings need emotional variety. Sadness or discouragement after a failure will eventually convert into an opposite state, most likely anger. And that’s when you’ll proceed to the second or third phase discussed in the next chapters.
