You can read lots of articles and opinion pieces that tout Failure as a pathway to success. They champion taking risks and making mistakes as a good way to find a formula for achievement. I can’t say I agree with this point of view. There is nothing wrong with not failing. Taking risks does not have to entail failure. And “failing” has an unhappy finality about it that runs counter to success in general. You can read a lot about failing and then starting over with the knowledge and experience you gained from failure. If this is the case, then you aren’t really “failing” and “starting over.” Rather, you are still continuing on your designated path. You may have encountered a bump, but you are still progressing. Failure implies that you have somehow stopped. And trust me, if you really fail you will know it. Falling short of a mark is not failing as long as you keep moving ahead toward success.
The point here is that it is NOT OK to fail. You should mind being wrong, not wear it as a badge of honor. Learn from a setback, to be sure. But also dislike it. If you have no problem saying “I’m sorry” or “I messed up” on a regular basis, you may be setting self-fulfilling expectations for yourself, and therefore for your teams. Don’t build an expectation of failure into your strategies. Be prepared for impediments, to be sure; but don’t assume them as part of your plan. Assume that you will get it right the first time. You might be surprised how often that will happen. Success also has a finality to it—the finality of completion and accomplishment.
So how do you distinguish success from failure? Look to the ultimate goal. People sometimes point to Thomas Edison’s famous 1,000 “failures” as he strove to invent the incandescent light bulb. Wrong. These were not failures. They were steps toward his ultimate goal, which he kept in sight and progressed toward. Failure would have been if he had not accomplished his goal and quit. He succeeded. Failure did not come into play.
Conversely, not keeping your eye on the goal can result in real failure. I once worked with a colleague who labeled interim underperformances as “opportunities to succeed.” He missed the point that these were also opportunities to continue to underperform. As his teams repeatedly missed their short-term goals, he became creative at masking failure in positive terms. For instance, his teams once lost less money than they were projected to lose in a given quarter. This was reported as success. Nope. It was progress, to be sure. But it was nowhere near success. Nor was it failure, at least not yet. Success would come from finally turning a profit and getting out of the hole. That is a very different thing from not being as deep in the hole as you used to be. But he got caught up in redefining intermediary shortcomings and lost sight of the larger goal.
My colleague never experienced the success of getting out of the hole, in large part because he did not recognize that not failing is not the same thing as succeeding. In the end, you either succeed or fail. He failed.
You can learn from not failing. What you learn is how not to fail.
