There may not be a better representation of failure than when a project you’ve been working on explodes spectacularly in front of an audience of thousands. When Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, does, how could it be said that his company did it in the end Release of the Starship prototype on Wednesday—The agony of failure is felt in the towers of flame and the clouds of burning shrapnel that they broadcast live all over the world.
Musk is an industrial billionaire and cheeky public figure famous for his resounding success in multiple industries. And yet it still fails often, occasionally even seeing its ambitions to build rockets transporting humans to Mars literally on fire.
He is not the only success mogul or icon who occasionally sinks into the wells of failure. Thomas Edison is known for his recognition its close relationship to failure; for years, JD Salinger’s literary genius ceased to be sung as his tales were continually rejected by New Yorkers; Michael Jordan did not form the high school college basketball team on his first attempt.
We don’t always have to take signals from the efforts of rich tycoons, especially those who have it reputation as squared as Musk’s—Or visionary inventors or legendary athletes. There is a lesson to be learned from the pitfalls overcome by immense success and anonymity. Failure grips us all, no matter how many triumphs we enjoy throughout life. But failure can be instructive. There are often important lessons, if not success sheets, within our failures: keep in mind that before it exploded, that SpaceX rocket he did something unprecedented—But appreciating this fact means rethinking the very concept of what it means to fail.
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Failure is a constant, so don’t pay attention to it
Known clichés about failure abound regardless of context, but especially at work. The notion of “failing early and often” exists to encourage younger workers struggling to establish themselves in their jobs. “Embracing failure” easily applies to entrepreneurs, who take bets on their first attempts to build something with permanence power. The suggestion is that the embrace of failure should be a momentary step toward an idealized idea of lasting success.
But in life, things are rarely so cut and dried. According to Ross McCammon, the author of the corporate etiquette guide Works well with others, success is accompanied by failure more often than you might expect. As he himself explains, however, this is really good, if failure can be interpreted as a useful dilemma.
“Failure is not dead,” 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 a vital part of the present and the future. ”
A conscious approach is key to recognizing how wrong steps can help you in the short or long term. McCammon emphasizes a more proactive approach, in which you acknowledge failures as they come and discuss them honestly with colleagues and bosses.
He says:
Recognizing success within failure becomes better immediately after recognizing what happens as failure. Or maybe even for. I believe that failing early and failing often works as a philosophy as long as you also evaluate early and evaluate often and make your assessments known to your peers and even to your boss.
Not everyone has the luxury of hosting jobs that are so friendly and able to understand bosses and colleagues. But you can avoid the black cloud of failure within your own mind by broadening your perspective on what it means to fail.
Accept that your career will not be linear
“I’ve been let go of almost every job I’ve had because of budgets or cuts,” says Sean Abrams, editor of the Ask Men website. As a 29-year-old millennial writer, Abrams is no stranger to the turmoil affecting the digital media industry, not to mention the flow that has permeated the broader labor market since the Great Recession of 2008. For those who occupy their position, failure is often born of circumstances beyond their control, a recognition that can provide a valuable perspective.
“Sometimes the factors that led to your failure have nothing to do with you. You just got the short end of the stick, ”says Abrams.
The etiquette of an unsuccessful company is too reductive to have instructive value. McCammon suggests that “we reject the idea of phases like failure and success and play a longer game,” in which we accept that the arcs of our careers will be anything but predictable.
He tells Lifehacker:
As we move forward in our career, we first think of it as a kind of line and a line that should be going up at all times. Of course, that’s not what happens. He doesn’t always climb up and sometimes he heads to one side and climbs on top of himself. Maybe he tried a new career for a few years, maybe he was unemployed for a while. Careers are not linear. And I think it’s a useful context for assessing failures.
One way to rethink failure, especially in a culture that is so passionate about success, is to think about it in less severe terms. Instead of dwelling on the drastic consequences of perceived failure, think of setbacks as instructional mistakes. Mistakes are normal and excusable and occur regularly. People who make mistakes are not usually defined by them, and McCammon believes you should own them without apology:
“What any successful person, young or old, is good at is making mistakes without apologies … it could be argued that a career is just a series of mistakes that navigates and turns into successes.”
With this mindset, it will not be at all difficult to find success in alleged failures.