Don’t Fear Failure. Fear Always Succeeding.

Fear of failure is certainly something I’ve wrestled with all my life. I am the son of a first-generation American who became the American dream personified. They surpassed my grandparents in terms of education, income and all the other ways we tend to measure success. On top of that, this parent of mine was brilliant and arguably one of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered.

While there was never an explicit comparison, growing up in their shadow was somewhat intimidating to me and it drove me to always try to succeed. I doubted I could ever surpass them but that didn’t stop me from thinking that I should. And that made the idea of failing incredibly daunting and something I worked very hard to avoid… to my long-term detriment, I now believe.

At the same time, I have been hearing for years these great sounding quotes about failure being good for you:

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein
The bigger the failure, the greater the lesson. – Anonymous
Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. – Henry Ford

See? They sound good, don’t they? But for me, they never seemed to penetrate into my core… to that place where I accepted them as universal truths. I might talk a good game, but I still had this overriding need to succeed that lasted well into adulthood. Then, as my life is apt to do, it hit me upside the head with the proverbial 2×4 and that finally knocked some sense into me.

What happened? I lost my job and a big part of my identity.

It was part of a corporate restructuring and there were certainly aspects of it that lessened the blow a bit but none of that changed the fact that my former company thought they could get along just fine without me. That the people staying had more to offer them than I did.

Ouch.

And suddenly, I found that I had failed at one of the biggies in life, keeping down a job. No one else in my family had ever lost a job; no one else had gone on unemployment; no one had had to explain to friends and family what had happened and try to put a brave face on it. A big part of how I saw myself and measured my worth was undermined and my confidence was shaken. Suddenly, every successful project or good performance review or raise had become tainted because I Had Failed.

I was crushed and worried and uncertain about the future. My self-image was shaken and things I had taken for granted could no longer be assumed to be safe. And the longer it took to find a new role, the more the pressure and self doubt grew. Thankfully, I realized early on that I needed to change my outlook and I managed to do so.

Looking back now, what is truly amazing is that this very dark period of my life turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. I’ll spare the journey for another post but what my “failure” did was cause me to look at life differently. I could no longer operate on autopilot, doing the same job well and trusting in that regular paycheck. Everything had to be re-examined and I realized I needed to do things that I’d not done before. It was daunting but it was also exhilarating.

Why? Because suddenly, there were possibilities again. I could do a job similar to what I knew or try for something radically different. I became an active participant in my life again, taking control of the aspects that I could and learning to accept those that I couldn’t. Yes, it was frightening and yes it was an emotional rollercoaster at times, but looking back now, I wouldn’t have changed anything.

Failing – and failing big – suddenly made failure less of that scary monster waiting to pounce to finally becoming that learning experience that Ford and Einstein were talking about.

Had I “succeeded” in retaining my position all those years ago, I would have thought myself lucky and my old definition of success (basically, not losing my job) would have been perpetuated. But if that had happened, then I’d never have started my own business. I would have never begun networking in earnest and would have missed meeting dozens – heck, hundreds – of amazing people in my community. Shoot, I would never have started this blog. I would be a different, probably lesser person had things gone the “safe and successful” way.

My failure, once faced, freed me to return to an almost childlike sense of what was possible. Which, even as I write it down, seems so counter-intuitive to me. But I’m living proof that it is true. Yes, we need to embrace failure when it happens but we should actually be more concerned about regular success. Success can breed complacency and reinforces the need to not rock the boat for fear of what we’ll potentially lose. What it took me decades to realize is that repeated success was slowly costing me tiny bits of my soul and was turning me into someone I did not really want to be.

With every ounce of enthusiasm I can muster, I encourage you to go out, engage in your life and try something new. (But be sure you do it for the experience and not for the proverbial trophy or recognition.)

Know that I’m pulling for you!

(And let me know if this inspires you to try something new and risk failure, or even if you, too, have found that failing beats continually winning.)