Frode Odegard

Make a big mistake? Could be the best thing that happened to you this week!Most of us have suffered from varying degrees of perfectionism.  Some live in an almost perpetual state of anxiety and guilt about not doing as well as they "should".  Even for those with a mild degree of perfectionism, progress towards goals can be severely hampered. Many of us procrastinate starting a new project until "the time is right" (that includes my blog postings!) or we treat ourselves harshly for making mistakes we feel we “must” avoid. Albert Ellis, arguably the grandfather of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, famously referred to this phenomenon as musterbation.

But what would life look like if we were less fearful of failures? 

Here are eight strategies you can try to help you embrace and exploit failures.  They are intended to help you achieve more and learn faster with less anxiety and guilt. I find that they work fairly well for me, and would welcome your thoughts.

1. Reframe failure - failures are inevitable and even good for you!

Failure is the state of not having achieved a goal or lived up to a standard.  Since we are not omnipotent or omniscient, we are almost always in a state of failure. We fail most of the time at most of the things we are trying to achieve! 99% of life is a series of small failures, and some big ones.  The other day I failed to stick to my diet, I failed to get to the gym, and I was stuck for hours working on something without much progress, when I “should” have just gone out and enjoyed the San Diego sunshine.

To help you convince yourself that failure is a natural part of your own life, try to make a list of everything that has gone wrong in the last three months. Include failures big and small, at work and in the rest of your life. Chances are you will end up with a pretty long list! 

Next, write down everything you have accomplished in the same time period.  List every possible accomplishment you can think of, even minor things. In spite of all the failures, you probably managed to accomplish a great many things. If you write down everything you have learned from your failures in the last ninety days, you will see that you have benefited quite a lot from them already.  Chances are good that you will begin to see how your failures have helped you make all the important course corrections that helped you achieve goals down the road.

High achievers don’t have lots of failures, you say? Wrong. A bit of web searching will lead you to countless stories about people like Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison, who failed countless times.  Edison reportedly viewed failure as helpful in identifying what materials didn't work for the light bulb. Athletes are no exception, either. Michael Jordan initially failed to make his high school basketball team.  You may also want to read this article in Fortune about 40-under-40 rising stars and what they have learned from some of the biggest mistakes they have made in their careers. 

Still need need more evidence?  Try talking to people you know who are very successful at what they do, and ask them about what’s gone wrong recently and what they have learned.  I am pretty sure they will be able to give you a long list of failures. Failures are everywhere.

But can failures really be good for you? 

It is of course natural to be wary of failures, especially when the cost of a failure can be very high. Some failures result in significant monetary losses, even deaths.  While many failures are preventable, this is because we have learned from previous failures. So the best way to look at failures is to view them as treasured learning experiences, 100% relevant to something you are trying to accomplish right now.

It is up to us whether we are students who refuse to show up for class, or eagerly absorb the new knowledge that life serves up on a daily basis. High achievers are not people who never make mistakes; they are people who choose to learn from their failures.

2. Capture all your ideas, even the crazy ones

Most of us think of failures as negative; we tend to want to avoid them as much as possible.  To do this, we can either stop making mistakes, which is not very realistic, or we can lower our standards.  It is easy, therefore, to get into the habit of dismissing most of our ideas and dreams as “unrealistic”. And they may well be.  But by systematically capturing your ideas, you free up capacity for generating new ideas. The same old ones won't be taking up energy and attention in your mind - unless you want them to.

You will also find that your creativity is improved by not censoring yourself at the point of idea generation. Eventually you will come upon a really great idea, and if you collect your ideas and look at them on a regular basis you will find yourself getting ideas about how to improve or combine other ideas.

Aside from keeping journals, a great way to capture and develop your ideas is to use mind maps. You can go a long way with just pen and paper for mind maps, but there are also a number of good software tools available. I use MindManager from Mindjet and I’ve been fairly happy with it. Mindjet recently began offering a collaborative solution for mind maps, where multiple people can access and edit mind maps at the same time.

As you start capturing more and more of your ideas, you will find that you are a much more creative person than you give yourself credit for. Patterns will begin to emerge. You will find that you have more ideas in some areas than others.  You will also discover that a lot of your ideas aren’t necessarily related to things you are working on right now, but they may come in handy later.  Of course, sometimes you will get great ideas that are about something you haven’t been paying attention to, but perhaps should. Capturing your ideas will make you aware of this as well.

3. Start something!

If you are using GTD to retain focus and perspective, then you already know the importance of reviewing your commitments to yourself and others on a regular basis. The same applies to new ideas.  By looking at your ideas on a regular basis and making decisions about them, you will not only feel better about all the ideas you are not pursuing, you will also have constant access to your full creative powers, not just the ideas that you happen to remember just at that moment.

Ideas that do NOT work out all contain many failures, in your thinking and in your execution.  Thus ALL ideas are valuable on some level. If you can make it safe for yourself to fail, your threshold for starting new projects is going to be much, much lower.  You can pursue all kinds of “crazy” projects without the expectation of achieving success, but simply to explore another train of thought and see where that goes.

A good way to start new projects that are a bit outside your comfort zone is to frame them to be mostly about exploring and looking into something, as opposed to actually building/achieving it.  At the beginning of this year, I wanted to explore Aikido, so I had a project called “R&D Aikido” which entailed some reading and visiting a dojo.  I decided I wasn’t ready to sign up just yet, but I learned enough to decide I definitely wanted to do it next year.  Most of the ventures I am developing start out that way.

4. Imagine wild success

If you feel comfortable with NOT reaching your goals, you are less likely to hold back from setting truly audacious goals.  One of the most valuable ideas I learned from David Allen’s work is to begin a new project by imagining what wild success would look like.  Not just adequate success or realistic success.  WILD success. Success beyond your wildest dreams.

Think of what that would mean for your existing projects.  If you defined success as what things would be like if you could have anything you wanted, you would probably feel differently about what you are doing. A very ambitious vision of success is more likely to inspire you (or force you) to try out new approaches, approaches likely to fail in various ways, which in turn is likely to result in more learning.

5. Pursue productive failures

Not all failures are equally good for you.  To explain this, I tend to use an informal equation I call the “failure equation”:

failure productivity = information / pain

Some failures result in a lot of pain over a prolonged period of time and yield little valuable information.  Being stuck in an abusive relationship or in dead-end job are good examples. I call such failures “meaningless suffering”, because there is very little meaning that can be derived from the suffering. The only meaningful action you can take when encountering such failures is to get out of the situation, to stop the failure as soon as possible.

Some failures don’t cause very much suffering, but there isn't much information to be gotten from them, either. I call such failures “annoyances”.  Good examples here include the elevator in your office building that keeps breaking down, the bulb in the garage that keeps flickering, and the odd sound your vacuum cleaner makes.  While annoyances might not upset us, they tend to take up time and attention that could better be invested in activities that are more fun and productive.  So survey your life for small annoyances and ask yourself whether you need to do something about them.

We all have our share of “tough lessons” – failures that result in some good learning, but at a significant cost as well.  Ask anyone who has gone through a divorce, a business failure, been fired, or lost someone close. Tough lessons are often unavoidable, so all we can do is to minimize the suffering as best as we can and be proactive about harvesting as much knowledge as possible.

The most productive failures are those which result in valuable information and don’t result in big economic losses, physical injury, or emotional pain.  Testing early-stage products with trusted pilot customers often results in important realizations without risking your company’s reputation.  Patiently learning a martial art is a series of productive failures, as one struggles to master new concepts, new techniques. Even casual dating can be viewed as a way to have productive failures, though it gets harder with serious relationships that fail.

The pursuit of failure can also be embedded into your project planning.  Whether you are planning your own projects or find yourself in a planning meeting with a group of people at work, a great question to pose is “what productive failures can we build into this project and what information do we want to get from them?”  This helps define the mindset; we will not only tolerate failures, we expect them as part of a project because that’s how we ensure that we learn and grow.

6. Mine failures for information to make them more productive

Every failure on your list is a potential treasure trove of information – if you take action to learn from it.   Here are some good questions you can ask about your failures:

• What consequences, direct and indirect, did this failure have?
• What assumptions did we make that were incorrect and why?
• What is the root cause of this failure?
• Is this failure similar to others that have happened?
• Could other failures similar to this be happening elsewhere right now?
• What are the implications for who should be engaged with this type of project?
• Do I or others need to learn new knowledge or skills to prevent this?
• What tactical adjustments need to be made as a result of this failure?
• What are the long-term consequences of this failure?        

If you are a GTD practitioner, you may want to consider adding a new item on your Weekly Review agenda, where you ask yourself what failures you had this week and what you need to do about them in terms of tactical adjustments as well as harvesting lessons learned.

7. Learn to fail more softly, take the pain out of failure

Just like we can make failures more productive by being proactive about harvesting information, we can do the same by taking steps to diminish the pain.  There are principally three types of pain from failure: economic loss (time and money), physical injury, and emotional pain.   We can reduce economic loss in most cases by failing in smaller steps, a lesson we see taught to practitioners of Agile software development, Evolutionary Delivery, and Lean Management.  Practitioners of martial arts learn how to fall without injuring themselves, as you can see an example of in this amazing video.

Emotional pain from failure, however, is by far the most universal problem.  In situations where one has been the victim of an assault or lost a loved one, a significant emotional pain in the form of anxiety, anger, and grief is unavoidable, of course.  Working with a therapist or grief counselor can soften the blow for many, and I highly recommend that as proactive step.  But in the case of self-imposed emotional pain due to negative self-talk, there is no reason why we should be subject to that at all.

The key issue with negative self-talk in failures is that we often tie our worth as a person to our ability to avoid any mistakes.  The more we can avoid that, the less we will feel bad when we make mistakes, and when we are less afraid to fail, we also tend to be less prone to the kind of mistakes we make when we are anxious or nervous.  We distract ourselves.  We forget things.  We fail to observe the obvious.

To get to the bottom of this issue, a good place to start is to learn about what Cognitive Therapists call Cognitive Distortions.   Cognitive Distortions are common thinking mistakes that result in negative emotions and irrational behavior. I also highly recommend David Burns’ book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy.  It has a great tools for identifying, capturing, and defeating negative self-talk.

If your mind persists in viewing failures as mostly negative, it might be a good idea to maintain a "portfolio" of your failures where you can see how they pay off over time.  It could be as simple as a four-column table where you record the failure, when it took place, what the pain or loss was, and what you learned.  The more evidence you accumulate of the positive impact of your failures, and the more you are able to soften the negative impact , the better you will feel.

8. Don’t be afraid to terminate projects

When you lower the threshold for launching new projects, you have to do the same for killing projects that are not going to result in productive failures.  If you don’t do this, you will soon become overwhelmed with new projects which you no longer feel enthusiastic about, and you will begin to go numb to the lessons you would otherwise be learning. You will also begin restricting your idea generation and you will be holding back on launching new projects. A good question to ask yourself when reviewing your project list is not whether a project is succeeding, but whether it has the chance of being a productive failure.  If that’s no longer the case, don’t hesitate to terminate it.

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Winston Churchill was right when he said that “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”  Failure is a natural part of life; it is a more common state than success, but most of us do not handle it well. We need to practice failure, we need to become as comfortable with it as competent martial artists are with falling.  By embracing productive failures as positive and natural, they become something we can expect and pursue as a value in our lives. If we view failures in the right way, we can literally fail ourselves to success.