Dealing with Failure!
Have you failed yet? Just look back at the last five years of your life.
Have you failed at work? Has your increment been lower than you expected? Have you been denied that promotion that you thought you deserved? What about that sales target that you did not achieve? Or a project that you worked on which just simply refused to take off?
What about other personal goals? At managing to wake up early? Or sleeping on time? Or quitting smoking? At controlling your diet? Or…..
Have you had a failed relationship – a father that doesn’t want to talk to you? A wife who thinks she may have made a mistake by marrying you? A girlfriend who decided to find a new boyfriend?
We can keep listing dozens of things in our personal and work life that we fail at fairly regularly. And everyone fails at something; most people fail at many. And the thing is, when you start looking at it carefully, there are only three types of people.
Type 1. People who fail and don’t even see it.
Type 2. People who fail and take it personally, and let failure dictate the future.
Type 3. And people who dust failure off, learn and start again.
Which type are you?
If you are the first type, then you are a probably a self absorbed sort of person. You are basically happy with what you have. You are too busy with yourself to notice that your family may need more than just your salary. You are having too good a time at office with your friends to seriously worry about performance. And guess what, your boss has probably already seen that – so maybe it shows up in your rating, in your job profile, in your compensation! So you have a choice, wake up. Or stay happy in your own little world that places no demands on you!
People who fail (and know it) are the ones who change the world ( Type 3). Ask any successful person whether he has failed, and his most probable response would be “many times”. This is the third type of person.
Enough has been written about this person too! Just Google failure and you will come up with dozens of self-help and motivational websites that tell you the most successful people are simply able to ‘dust off and continue’.
Our interest is more in the second set of people ( Type 2 ). These are people like us. They try hard. They fail often. And most times they take the failure personally and just stop trying. We have many living example of failure. We fail regularly at tasks we set ourselves to do. Big tasks – like quitting smoking. And small tasks – like responding to all my pending e-mails by the end of the day!
At most times it gets pretty frustrating. We keep trying something and it never seems to work! This happens so often to people who want to Quit smoking for instance. They move from one plan to another regime without results, and then finally they just give up!
Having failed so often, and at so, so many things, guess qualifies us as the experts on failing and surviving. I think ‘failing and surviving’ is probably the first step to being that rare person who ‘fails and eventually succeeds’.
Ways to deal with failure:
Here are some list of tips and pointers. Use them freely; some may work for you, and some may not. The examples are just those, examples. You can simply change each situation to fit into your own life and goals.
1. Always set goals. If you don’t set goals, you would never know when you failed, right? Ideally, set goals that you can see in the near future. So saying ‘I will earn 10 crore in 5 years’ sounds nice and ambitious, but often it has no plan behind it.
2. Set goals ONLY of things that matter to you. If something is not critical for you and for your family, then it’s quite likely you won’t pay any attention to it. Often goals just get set in the heat of the moment, and then never get worked upon. Those of you who have ever been in sales will be familiar with this situation – you do badly versus your targets one month, and then you declare – “I will double the sales next month” – and then you fail again the next month! Has this happened to you too?
3. Always make a plan to get to your goal. This is often the hard part. There are always many different ways to achieve your goal. So to lose 5 kilos in 3 months, you could go on a diet, you could start exercising, you could stop consuming sugar, or have some slimming pills. Choosing which path will work for you is the toughest thing. I think being honest is very important in making your plan. Are you able to carve out one hour every day for exercise? If the answer to that is a flat NO, then it’s pretty silly to use ‘regular exercise’ as your plan of action.
4. Always measure progress. If there is anything life teaches us, it is “what gets measured, gets done”. The simple recipe for failure is to not measure progress. Imagine, setting a goal of earning 10 lakh from the stock market this year, and realizing on December 15th that you have lost 3 lakh! If that happens to you, just throw that goal into the dustbin – it was never important to you!
5. Make a list of things that will make you fail. We call these the list of ‘road bumps’. If we can fully realize all the things that will make us fail, and if we can avoid those situations, then it always improves our chances of success. Many smokers who are trying to quit for example, stop going to bars & smoking at public places , in front of your children!
6. Failed Again!! Now What. This is always the best part. Despite setting realistic goals, despite having a plan, despite measuring progress, and despite trying really hard, you have FAILED AGAIN!
What next?
I have seen so many people who will fail a few times and just give up. They stop trying. They quit the job. They look for an escape. Or they start looking for an excuse to blame the failure on!
What works? Simple. OWN the FAILURE.
When we fail, simply say to ourselves – “I failed”.
But that alone can be depressing. And it doesn’t help. So ask yourself another question. “Why?”
It is in answering this WHY that the really successful people excel. If you knew why you failed, then you could fix that particular issue and try again, right? When you try and answer that question, you are forced to face some things.
- Did you fail because you did not follow your own plan?
- Did you fail because of some outside factors? Could you have done something to control those outside factors?
- Did you fail because the goal was – after all – not so important to you?
- Did you fail because you don’t enjoy the task & the challenge?
- Did you fail because the goal was too ambitious?
In answering this, do be honest. Remember, these are conversations with yourself. And if you are not honest with yourself, then you are not giving yourself any chance of success!
And the last question always
- Did you fail completely? Or did you come some steps closer to success? Did you learn anything that could make you succeed next time?
We always find that people who take this approach tend to keep trying! They don’t give up saying ‘mujhse nahin hoga’! They keep walking the treadmill of life, accept that failure is part of it, and absorb the rich lessons that life has for us every day – as long as we keep our eyes open!
You may have never heard of Mary Pickford before but please read this quote from her.
“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down”
And it really isn’t important who she was!