Epic fail: Lessons on failure

I’ve been thinking a lot about failure recently. A few months back I read John Maxwell’s book Failing Forward: How to Make the Most of Your Mistakes, and I’ve been posting some of those thoughts on facebook as my “thought for today” ever since.

About a week ago we had an event at our church that I was in charge of. It was a “Couples Night Out” event where we partnered with Family Christian Stores to show the movie War Room. You can read more about that here.

In some ways, you could say the event was a success, but mostly I came away from it feeling like a failure. Only around 50 people showed up for it, out of a church of about 1800 on a Sunday morning and around 1,000 in small groups.

I had to really spend some time processing this and thankfully my wife is great at helping me do that. And I didn’t have to pay a therapist!

I came away from it with a few lessons learned about failure, reinforced by what I’ve been reading.

ONE Events can be failures; people are not.

This is such an important distinction to make. I think it’s probably human nature to come away from an event we feel we’ve failed at and to feel ourselves like a failure. It seems like just semantics but this is so important: I am not a failure. I may have failed at something. But I am not a failure.

When we assign failure to ourselves, to the person, there’s not much hope of recovering from that or improving. If I am a failure, I have no choice but to fail.

But if instead I assign failure to an event or an action, I can learn from it and go on.

TWO Rarely can an entire event be called a failure. Look for the positive.

Many times we can see where our failure has compounded: we see that we did this wrong, and that, and the other. And this drowns us in a vortex of failure.

But if we step back and look objectively—and this is where another viewpoint is so helpful—we’ll see that not everything about the event or project was a failure. We need to recognize the silver lining in the dark cloud.

When we impartially look back, with the help of a spouse or coworker or friend or counselor, we can see these bright spots. But it takes effort to look for them. For me and my event, yes, only 50 people came. But those were 50 people who needed to come and were inspired. Some of those 50 people I did not know, so that was a good thing.

There were other positives, and many lessons learned as well, which I might get to in another post.

It takes some work of reflection, and it’s harder for some personalities than others, but you have to take off those pessimistic glasses and put on the rose-colored ones, and hopefully get a more realistic picture of the event. Then you can more objectively see the failures and successes together.

THREE  It’s only a failure if you don’t truly try.

For me, inaction—in the form of perfectionism and procrastination, and probably some other ways I’m not quite aware of yet—keeps me from trying. The faulty reasoning goes like this: If I don’t try, I can’t fail.

But the reality is that not trying really is failing. And the inverse is trying = success. As long as you are out there trying and learning from your efforts and applying those learnings to greater efforts and more trying, you are winning.

FOUR  It’s not a failure; it’s just an experiment.

Remember Thomas Edison’s quote when he had gone through thousands of failed experiments in trying to come up with a commercially viable light bulb:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

Ultimately, if we can keep from looking at ourselves as failures and also not look at the events themselves as failures, but rather as experiments and experiences, we can learn and grow from them.

But we need to spend some time in reflection as well as discussion with others to learn. John Maxwell says:

Experience is not the best teacher; evaluated experience is.

So next time you feel like a failure, reframe yourself and the experience. You are not a failure. Look for the positive in what has happened. You are a success just because you tried and put yourself out there. And this experiment will help you learn and grow and make you better.

How do you positively approach failure so you can learn from it?