It seems like a lot of advice that’s given to new job seekers is focused around failure. In the past month, I’ve seen dozens of articles with titles like these:
- Don’t Be Afraid To Fail
- Failure Can Help
- Why Everyone Needs To Fail
- How Failing Helped Me Succeed
The basic premise is that everyone needs some failure in their professional lives to learn how to better gauge and appreciate success. Failure is necessary to help you learn from your mistakes. You need to learn humility, which can only come around through failing. Failure is the best teacher. Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.
While I agree with the sentiment, if I wanted that much fail, I’d just go to Failblog.
There are plenty of people who have overcome failure to become successful. In fact, some people failed so hard that they started to win. Hell, I spent a year after college slowly failing until my bank account couldn’t take it anymore. Since then, I’ve learned how to work smarter and have become a more effective and efficient worker. But failure, despite its many forms, is nothing without success.
Failure is okay. It’s not the end of the world if you fail. But setting out with anything except total success in mind is just leaving the door wide open for anything but victory. In order to do anything well, be it keeping a job or playing sports, one should always try to have more wins than losses.
And sure, it’s better to fail when you’re young, so you don’t have as many social or familial obligations to attend to. But burning out on a start-up, losing a client for your company, making an accounting error or making any mistake is something that should be done partially, not totally. In any good company, there should be a system set up to help correct mistakes before they become failures. For those who are new and might make mistakes, there should be a support system of co-workers and managers to help catch them.
So if you feel that you absolutely have to fail, get it over with by failing at something inconsequential. Lose badly at a poker game with friends. Strike out with someone at a bar. Enter a dancing competition even though you have two left feet. The feeling of failure will still be there, and you can learn from it there. But to obsess over failing (or not having failed yet) won’t help you.
Everyone will at some point experience full-blown, no-holds-barred failure. And it will be devastating. But to work in the anticipation of failure is to mitigate success.
