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Your failures matter

Did you know that a large percentage of people experience a significant fear of failure? Not just fear but outright terror.

One study in the US found that 31% of people are terrified of failure.

Another study found that half of all respondents believe they can be better at work if they weren’t scared of making a mistake.

Did I ever tell you about the time when I updated almost all verbiage on most Careerbuilder websites to a single French phrase? Yeah, the post mortem meetings were not fun. However, my fuck-up led to changing how our production databases could be updated. And that prevented future potentially much worse calamities.

Fear of failure is responsible for heightened anxiety, depression, lower self-esteem, lower life satisfaction, avoidance, procrastination…well, I could go on but you get the gist.

What matters is that this fear is generally a product of negative self-talk and internal perceptions. It’s not a product of facts or reality. So we can do something about it.

What if you looked at things like this: you’re an engineer and your life is the project you’re working on.

Engineering projects are literally tens and usually hundreds and sometimes thousands of failures. How many screw-ups occur simply depends on the complexity of the project. But they ALWAYS occur. Multiple times in multiple ways.

Until the final time. When it works. And success is achieved.

Are you an engineer? Perhaps not. So what does this have to do with you?

Engineers and engineering aren’t some special conceptual things. Engineers are regular people and engineering challenges are like any other challenge. The difference is that in the engineering profession failure is not only accepted, it’s expected. It’s understood that there’s no way around it. Nobody knows everything and you have to start doing a thing to figure out what won’t work.

And every time you figure out what doesn’t work you change it. And then find out the next thing that doesn’t work. Rinse and repeat. Keep iterating until nothing breaks and you get the desired result.

And it’s accepted and expected that there may be *many* iterations before success is achieved. In fact, as many as it takes.

So if the advances mankind has made are built on failure why do we celebrate them? Because they were difficult and there were many mistakes along the way. Otherwise what is there to celebrate? Nobody celebrates easy things. Unless you get a thrill from tying your shoelaces…in which case, you’re probably are the happiest human to ever exist.

If you feel like you’ve screwed up, that’s fine. You’re just an engineer who’s project is your own life. Keep iterating, keep learning. Keep trying out different solutions. And if you need to beef up your resilience take a look here.