How do you know you are growing? If you are failing, you’re on the right path. While failure is always positive, the day to day experience can still be difficult and mindset matters. When it comes to failure, we’re often afraid of what other people might think rather than the actual failure. Failure also means that you are trying, experimenting and learning. When we embrace failure — and also those feelings we experience around failure — we can start to see the truths it uncovers for us. Failure lets us know when things aren’t working, and when we need to either adapt or stop what we’re doing, and this can include stepping away from your original idea or business. Rather than being afraid of it, failure is something that we should all work hard to do more of — whether we own businesses, freelance, consult or work for someone else — and encourage and support others to do it too. So how do we embrace failure and make it work for us?
One person’s failure can be someone else’s success. Starting by unpicking what failure is — does it even exist? — is a healthy way of learning to take the sting out of it but also to love it.
Some substantial and healthy goals are a really good way of looking at failure in a different light. Once you start thinking about every failure as leading you closer to your goals, failures become something to look forward to.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all roadmap for businesses. You’ve got to explore different paths to know what works for you. No route is a complete dead-end either, they all lead to something else. So when you fail, just do what you would do if you were on a journey and lost your way: don’t panic, have a rest, something to eat or drink and work out what you’re going to do next. You’ll have it figured out in no time.
Failure gives you an opportunity to see what went wrong, and also what you would do differently next time. The only way to grow is by trying, adapting and trying again.
While you can plan for things to run perfectly, it’s not always the case. Maybe it was your fault, or maybe it was out of your control. Either way, it’s happened.
Shit happens, and it’s ok. Laughter and sleep are the best medicine for anything.
“I consider failures valuable for what I can learn from them and I trust that they are leading me to my next endeavour. Through failure, I have altered my definition of success. If I am about 70% happy with how a project turned out and had fun doing it, got to experiment and had time to live life rather than simply work, that is 100% success to me.” — Chantal Gagnon, Stationery Designer, Socolo
“After working as an in-house stylist on interiors magazines for about 13 years and being very much in control of my shoots from start to finish, I don’t think I worked terribly well as a freelancer. I certainly didn’t enjoy it as much. I think this was when I decided that whatever came next, I wanted to be in control.” — Poppy Norton, Jewellery Designer
“I’m possibly not very good at failing. I don’t like to do it. I listen in awe to the guests on the How To Fail podcast. My daughter, who is learning to read, whispered to me the other day ‘Mummy, what if I get a word wrong?’ I told her that if that happens it doesn’t matter because that’s what learning is and she can just try again. At one point I wanted to do a PhD after my Master’s. I’ve yet to start it, so maybe that’s a failure.” — Leo Taylor, Writer & Artist, Ordinary Shapes
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