#052 How to achieve failure
“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”
Two tales of failure are about to collide. Separated by space and time, let's start with the second and finish with the first.
An email pings and my heart races. Four years of diligent sacrifice condensed into an impersonal verdict.
It is with deep regret that we inform you that you have not been successful in gaining an interview for Neurosurgery National Selection. The calibre of applicants was very high this year and we do encourage you…
Everything persists unchanged. The table is still smooth, the trees outside still dance, and the air is still crisp with spring's arrival - but I am different. My first abject failure hits home and I close the laptop. The screen goes dark and with it my imagined future.
Where to now?
One hundred years earlier and three thousand miles away, a fire lights and grows into an inferno. The firemen rush as the sun dawns to realise it is not the first light of the day. A millionaire’s factory full of his life’s work is completing the carbon cycle earlier than intended. There is no stopping Nature’s process.
The owner is told and rushes to gather his family:
“Where’s Mom!” he shouts. “Go get her! Tell her to get her friends! They’ll never see a fire like this again!”
With a smile, his eyes reach to the top of the blaze as his work collapses to the ground.
Thomas Edison was 63 years my senior when he confronted failure.
Failure is not just an event. It's a skill.
Think of failure as Edison’s fire. Some folks treat it like a devastating force. They stumble, and suddenly their confidence goes up in smoke. Their momentum turns to ash. Progress becomes a distant ember, barely glowing.
But others? They're fire chiefs. They treat failure like a controlled burn. They use setbacks to clear away the underbrush of doubt, to fertilise the soil of their experience with rich ash. When the next challenge comes, their ground is primed to grow.
Here are 4 steps to help you welcome the fire of failure.
Allow yourself to fail
The word fail has its roots in the Anglo-Norman word failer, meaning ‘non-occurrence’ or ‘cessation of supply’. To fail means for something not to happen, or not be delivered as intended. That is all.
It isn’t a judgment of your character. It doesn’t predict the future. It doesn’t mean anything of significance happened. It is a non-event. Reframe society’s version of failure to what it means —the absence of significance.
“I’ve been through a lot of things like this. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui.” - Edison
Learn about failure
Edison rode an iceberg of failure. His fire was just the tip. Before the lightbulb, there was the electric pen, a talking doll, ore mills, the tinfoil phonograph and 2774 attempts at making electricity provide illumination.
And he wasn’t alone. J. K. Rowling was homeless, Steve Jobs got fired, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, and Einstein couldn’t speak until he was nine. When you look for failure you see it’s ubiquitous but unspoken. An unseen metric we don't value.
Reframe failure
In writing there is there a technique called “the inciting incident” - if in doubt have two guys burst through the door holding machine guns. The inciting incident kicks off the action and the story's arc.
Your failure is your inciting incident. It’s the opening act, not the final scene.
“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.” - Edison
Act again in failure’s arena
The fact you failed means you tried. Tried something that others won’t or can’t imagine to attempt. In the moment you will forget this because of the anaesthesia of familiarity. You won’t see that you wilfully stepped into the arena and tried while others look on.
"It is not the critic who counts...The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming...who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Teddy Roosevelt
Take the lesson, leave dust, sweat and blood and stand back up in the arena.
Every fire chief once singed their eyebrows. Every chef has burnt their hands.
Become a firefighter of failure. Start small, embrace tiny sparks of defeat, learn to manage them then gradually take on bigger blazes.
That's how you turn failure from a destructive force into fertiliser for success.
Fail often. Achieve failure.
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