By Brian Sutter
We put big stakes on winning in our culture. “Losers” aren’t respected; they failed, after all. In some circles, failure is such a sin that it dwarfs anything else about “the loser”—any good they might have done, or smart moves they might have made.
Even if we don’t think of failure as if it was the third rail, we all know we should avoid it—even little children know this. Because success is where all the good stuff is, right? There aren’t any upsides to failure. But that might not necessarily be so. It all depends on how we define success or failure in the first place.
Avoiding failure: the hidden cost
For some, simply avoiding mistakes can define a sort of success. It’s certainly a safe way to go about your life, though, it’s actually more likely to hem you in than anything else.
That’s the real problem with trying to avoid failure at all costs. Fear of failure can restrict a life—or a business—so badly that it might technically succeed at thousands of tiny things, but fail in the big picture. Kind of like a Blockbuster store that is run perfectly according to its manual, but is so focused on being a perfect Blockbuster store that it never sees Netflix or YouTube coming.
Some people call this playing “the small game.” It’s when you get all the little things right. You avoid risk. You look good in front of your peers and your “superiors.”
In business, this might mean you pick a nice, safe, proven business model. You design your business for steady, predictable growth. You do well in good years, maybe even getting the 5% or better revenue growth most small business owners expect for 2017.
Don’t get me wrong—I do not knock this business approach. I just want you to be aware that there are risks to trying to be perfectly safe. If you are totally focused on avoiding every possible failure, you can pen yourself into the small game…and find yourself in the business (or personal) equivalent of owning a perfectly-run Blockbuster store.
Move fast and break things
Then there’s the other side of the spectrum. The high-risk, high-reward mindset. It’s embodied in sayings like Facebook’s old mantra, “Move fast and break things.” This fearless embrace of potential failure sounds almost romantic to some. It’s a good angle for a pitch in Silicon Valley or a way to sell a movie script in Hollywood. And if you’ve got the backbone, and the resources, and the resilience, it can be a formula for success.
Just don’t get too romantic about it. I cannot lie to you: Failure hurts. It’s hard. Both entrepreneurs and regular people know big failures aren’t romantic. It’s frightening to have $7 in your checking account. Having your parents give you “that look” when you show up on their door after your business (or your life) has crashed is no fun.
So let’s face it: We fear failure. Even those of us who don’t let it make decisions for us—we still fear failure. We just don’t let it hem us in. As has been said before, “courage is fear walking.”
But there is one major problem with how most people view failure: They see it as an end. In fact, it’s just a beginning. The lessons of thousands of success stories (almost every one, actually) are that success starts with failure. That’s the norm, not the outlier.
When we’re honest with ourselves, we all know failure is inevitable. But even to say that is a little bit dishonest. Failure happens more often than success. Most of the stretches we take in life are likely to fail, and the good news is that’s fine.
To succeed, we must fail
As Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda Motor Co, puts it: “Success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents the 1% of your work that results from the 99% that is called failure.” He’s not the only one to take this view. As books like Failing Forward will tell you, failure is just the early stages of success.
So here’s the problem: If we are scared off by failure, then we will never get to the good stuff. We’ll avoid failure like the plague, cutting ourselves off from success.
It may just be that failure is the essential ingredient of success. This includes small failures—things we’ve tried that didn’t work—and big failures…especially big failures—good, hard, rock-bottom crashes.
As J.K. Rowling said in her exceptional 2008 Harvard graduation address, rock-bottom failure means a stripping away of the inessential. It refocuses us. She says the gift of her low point was:
I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me...And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
That benefit alone might be enough to make a case for failure. But it’s not its only virtue. Failure—repeated failure, especially—teaches one of the key skills of a winner: perseverance.
People who overcome failure build up tremendous perseverance. This lets them not only keep going through their failures, but causes them to press on, even when things are good. It’s that perseverance that turns good into very good…and with even more work, very good into great.
Failure develops other sister virtues to perseverance, too—like resilience and flexibility. These are the assets of people who not only succeed but also don’t clutch on to their success. They know they’re good enough to get it back, should fortunes change again.
Conclusion
So maybe every failure is success…just a success not yet hatched. Like so many things in life, we just don’t recognize it for what it is when we first encounter it. If that’s true, we might even start creating our successes by deliberately risking failure.
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Brian Sutter serves as Wasp Barcode Technologies’ director of marketing, where he sets the strategic direction and oversees the tactical execution of the company’s marketing programs. He is also a small business marketing and technology thought leader and contributes to a variety of publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Washington Post, and Fast Company. He loves connecting with small business owners as well as like-minded individuals. He can be found at @SmallBizBrian, Google+, and LinkedIn.