There is perhaps no better representation of failure than when a project you were working on explodes spectacularly in front of an audience of thousands. When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk does it – as his company probably did at the end of the point Starship prototype launched Wednesday—The fear of failure is made palpable in flame towers and clouds of burning grenades around the world.
Musk is a billionaire industrialist and a prolific public figure known for his resounding success in various industries. And yet he still often fails, and he sometimes sees that he has ambitions to construct rockets that will transport people to Mars literally going up in flames.
He is not the only successful magnate or icon who sometimes falls into the pit of failure. Thomas Edison is known for his recognition his close relationship with failure; JD Salinger’s literary genius went unsung for years, as his short stories were constantly rejected by the New Yorker; Michael Jordan did not make the varsity basketball team of his high school with his first attempt.
We do not always have to give indications of the efforts of affluent tycoons – especially those with reputations as checkered as Musk’s—Either from visionary inventors or legendary athletes. There is a lesson to be learned from the obstacles that are overly successful as well as the anonymous ones. Failure creeps up on us all, no matter how many triumphs we enjoy over the course of a lifetime. But failure can be instructive. There are often important lessons, if not successes, within our failures – consider the fact that the SpaceX rocket exploded before it done something unknown—Revaluating it means rethinking the concept of what it means to fail.
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Failure is constant, so do not dwell on it
Known clichés about failure abound, regardless of context, but especially in the work. The idea of ’early and often failure’ exists to encourage younger workers struggling to find a foothold in their jobs. ‘Embrace of failure’ is easily applied to entrepreneurs, who venture into their early attempts to build something with endurance. The suggestion is that your embrace of failure should be a short step towards an idealized idea of lasting success.
But in life, things are seldom quite so cut and dried. According to Ross McCammon, author of the corporate etiquette guide Work well with others, success comes more often with failure than you would expect. As he puts it, however, it is a good thing – if failure can be interpreted as a useful dilemma.
“Failure is not a dead thing,” he tells Lifehacker. ‘It’s a living thing, and you can draw energy from it. But the longer you wait to think about it, the more calcified it becomes. And then it’s just a big dead thing that happened, instead of an important part of your present and future. ”
A conscious approach is the key to realizing how wrong mistakes can help you in the short and long term. McCammon emphasizes a more proactive approach, in which you recognize failures when they come and discuss them honestly with colleagues and bosses.
He says:
Recognizing success within failure is best immediately after realizing what is happening as failure. Or maybe even during. I think failing early and failing often works as a philosophy, provided you also assess and judge early and make your assessments known to your colleagues and even your boss.
Not everyone has the luxury of such accommodating workplaces and friendly, understanding bosses and colleagues. But you can avoid the black cloud of failure in your own mind by broadening your perspective on what it means to fail.
Assume that your career will not be linear
“I quit almost every job I had because of budgets or downsizing,” says Sean Abrams, editor of the Ask Men website. As a 29-year-old Millennial writer, Abrams is no stranger to the digital media industry revolution, not to mention the flood that has swept the broader labor market since the Great Recession in 2008. For those in his position, failure is often the result of circumstances beyond their control – acknowledging it can provide valuable perspective.
‘Sometimes the factors that led to your failure actually have little to do with you at all. You just got the short end of the stick, ‘says Abrams.
Naming a failure of a failed business is too reductive to have much instructive value. McCammon suggests that we ‘reject the idea of phases such as failure and success and play a longer game’, in which we accept that the bows of our career will be anything but predictable.
He tells Lifehacker:
As we move through our careers, we first consider it a kind of line and a line that must go up at all times. That, of course, is not what is happening. It does not always go up and sometimes it goes sideways and runs on its own. Maybe you tried a new career for a few years, maybe you were unemployed for a while. Careers are not linear. And I think that’s a useful context for judging failure.
One way to reformulate failure, especially in a culture that makes the successful individuals so overly lions, is to take it less seriously. Instead of dwelling on the drastic consequences of a supposed failure, think of setbacks rather than instructive mistakes. Mistakes are normal and excusable, and they happen often. People who make mistakes are usually not defined by them – and McCammon thinks you should own yours unapologetically:
“What any successful person – young or old – is good at is making mistakes … you can argue that a career is just a series of mistakes that you navigate and make successful.”
With the state of mind, it will not be difficult at all to find success within your alleged failures.