The Best Way to Get Better as a Young Leader is to Fail
The biggest mistake you can make in your career and in your life as a young leader is to try and protect yourself from failure. If you want to become who you want to be, you must be willing to fail. If you want to get hired, you must be willing to get fired. If you want to get clients, you must be willing to get rejected. The reality is everyone fails at some point in their lives especially young leaders. Thus, the most important question is not whether or not you will fail, but how you respond to failure.
There are basically two ways to respond to failure. For most of us, when we fail, we give in to anger, despair, feel sorry for ourselves, and complain that the world is unfair. But there is another way to respond to failure, one which is used by highly successful people. You can acknowledge and accept what has happened, identify learning and growth opportunities and bounce back. According to billionaire entrepreneur and Virgin Group founder, Richard Branson, failure is the most useful lesson of all.
I have discovered that to successfully deal with failure, you've to stop internalizing it. Look at failure as life giving you information that you can use to do better tomorrow. Successful people accept failure as feedback. Accepting failure does not mean giving up and letting the stress and frustrations take over. It’s about acknowledging that something has not worked as expected, and leaning in to experience the full range of emotions that come with failure, but also trusting that you will bounce back.
I am not suggesting that this is easy. It’s not. It’s very normal to react to failure with symptoms of anxiety as long as that anxiety does not paralyze you. I am sure when Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, the company he co-founded; he must have felt awful, mad, and a little bit discouraged. But what he did next is what separates successful people from the rest of us. He didn’t stay discouraged for long, but went on to found NeXT and if you have studied his life story like many have, you know that the rest is history. Steve Jobs returned to rescue Apple from near bankruptcy in 1997 and by the time he died in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company.
When successful people fail, they reframe their failures. Reframing your failures is a great way to build resilience and grow from the experience. You are not your failures. You are you. Your failures do not have to define you. Don’t make the mistake of attaching yourself to how many times you have failed, “I am a loser, I have failed so many times.” This attitude only paralyzes you and inhibits you from learning and growing from the experience. You have to learn to let go and move on. Your failures are not who you are. Your failures are simply opportunities for learning and growth, nothing more.
The great paradox is that we learn the most from our failures. But we're not taught that in school. In school, we're taught that we only learn when we get an A. And that's the problem.
I know it’s not easy to not feel ashamed or embarrassed when things don’t work out as you expected, but sometimes failure is a blessing in disguise. Instead of beating yourself too hard, look at the situation as an opportunity to reposition yourself. To get in touch with yourself. To take responsibility for yourself. And to express your true self and real emotions in an authentic way.
I love this quote from Thomas Edison, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Never, ever, ever, give up.
When I look back at all the failures I have experienced in my own life (both in business and personal), I realize that most of those failures actually contributed to the success I achieved later. No one wants to fail, but it happens. Failure sucks, but that’s how we grow. I will be honest with you. There are some failures I did not want to learn from and I repeated them until the lesson was learned.
Look at your own journey to date, and all the failures you have experienced.
What have you learned so far?
What would you do differently?
By focusing on personal growth, it will feel less like a personal failure and more like life giving you information and feedback, which it really is. Failure is a great opportunity to be honest with yourself and identify the things you need to do differently in order to be better tomorrow. Successful people are not afraid to be brutally honest with themselves and as a result they bounce back much faster from their setbacks and failures.
If you are a business owner and your business has failed, the immediate reaction is anxiety. But if you are able to take a moment and step outside your immediate anxiety and focus on what you have learned about yourself, your company, your market, and your life as a whole, you will realize your failures have actually enriched you.
Failure challenges us to play bigger, make adjustments, and re-think our approach. No one wants to fail, but if you become a willing student and reframe it in terms of what you have learned, you can still benefit in the long run and achieve more success as a result.