lifeskills

Will You Be a Fantastic Failure or Awesome Underachiever?

Is it better to ‘underachieve’ or to ‘fail’?

The Harvard Business Review Blog recently talked about the best type of failure to learn from.  The article states: “The essential insight is that partial failures are far more valuable than total breakdowns.”

photo by KungPaoCajun

photo by KungPaoCajun

So is failure too much to learn anything?

Apparently an element of success is necessary to allow greater success to follow.  Therefore, underperformance is preferable to complete failure.

In my mind, the words ‘failure’ and ‘underachiever’ are too subjective to differentiate.  The HBR piece even admits, “underperformance is a form of failure”.

This being the case, how prepared should we be to fail?  If we can’t answer that, how do we know how far to go before we’ve failed too much to learn anything from?

Stefan of Study Successful (who I mentioned just recently on here), told me that it’s important to fail:

“That is the way you will learn things! Underperform will take a lot of time to actually learn something…Failure will be a slap in the face, forces you to learn faster. How do you notice underperformance?”

Stefan explores the matter further at his blog.

As I see it, failure can be a slap, but only if you’re prepared to accept it.  The same can be said for underperformance.  If you’re in denial, you won’t let anything slap you down.  You must accept the fact that problems don’t just belong to other people.

Once you start the process of identifying personal weaknesses and admitting shortcomings, you’re in a better position to start learning from all sorts of failure.  In terms of the HBR piece, they were discussing the state of physical buildings.  While they make pertinent points, the situation isn’t as simple for our subjective and chaotic minds.  Physical forces are certainly unpredictable, but in completely different ways to the brain.

By the nature of who we are, we all make mistakes every day.  You can’t stop making them, but you can look at how to make sense of those mistakes, how to recognise mistakes, and how far you’re willing to accept your own mistakes in order to change.

The subjectiveness of failure brings up all sorts of opinions and ideas:

  • Seth Godin – “If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you’ll never have a shot at success.”
  • Daniel H. Pink – “Most people are more frightened of failure than of mediocrity. It should be the reverse.”
  • David Rogers – “Definitions of failure effectively put it as the opposite of success, being unsuccessful. However, failure is a far more emotive word.”
  • Ririan – “All it takes is for you to have the courage to fail once in a while.”
  • Michael J. Formica – “…we all possess the potential to rise from the ashes of our own defeat, if we can get out of our own way long enough to see what lessons that defeat has wrought.”

How do you learn from your mistakes?  What level of failure are you best at working with?  And would you rather develop after underachieving or totally failing?

You or ‘everyone else’?

Just because “everyone else does it” doesn’t mean you should join in.

It may be ‘everyone‘ around you drinking heavily and partying regularly, it may be ‘everyone‘ procrastinating on purpose, it may be ‘everyone‘ moaning about the state of the course without actively trying to change things.  Whatever you see ‘everyone‘ doing, don’t be afraid to make your own decision and do something else.  Your different attitude probably won’t be noticed.

photo by AndYaDontStop

photo by AndYaDontStop

Shunning the popular choice may be difficult and uncomfortable.  Doubly so if your decision means giving up something you enjoy or challenging yourself to work harder.  So long as you don’t give up anything important, it’s fine to forego the odd social outing or escapade.  You may even be indulging in too many entirely respectable activities.  Do you really need to be an active member of 7 societies, volunteer for 2 causes, keep down a part-time job, and try to stay on top of study?

While you shouldn’t feel obliged to defend your decisions, there will be the odd time when someone does question your actions.  Usually it doesn’t take more than thanking a person for their advice and quickly moving away from the conversation.  On the (very) rare occasion you face greater questioning, stay strong and don’t be afraid to point out why you’ve chosen a particular direction.  If you aren’t getting anywhere, if you feel uncomfortable talking about it, or if you don’t want to justify your actions to someone else, politely explain that you don’t want to discuss it further and (if necessary) physically move away from the situation.

Peer pressure has many faces.  A small percentage is uncalled for and something you don’t need from so-called ‘mates’.  Fortunately, much of it is friendly and of little consequence.  That’s why you probably have nothing to fear when you choose not to do what everybody else is doing.

It feels so much easier to let others make decisions for you.  If it goes wrong, you’ve got someone else to blame.  The truth is that when you make your own decisions, you begin to feel more in touch with what you truly want and need.  Don’t fear that you’ll become arrogant.  You should still listen to others, engage in debate, and appreciate that you’re not always right.  With that, the confidence in your decisions does help you grow stronger, getting you to think more clearly and independently before making commitments.

How have you moved away from an otherwise popular situation?  Have you taken a different attitude and found it worked to your advantage?

What will you do today?

What will you do today?  What will you do to shine?  What will you do to innovate?  What will you do to bring you closer to whatever it is you want?

I don’t know what you want, but I know a lot of things are within reach.  They’re just hiding most of the time.  Makes the game interesting…

My personal aim on this blog is to encourage all of you to take control of what’s at your disposal and use it well.  No need to hurt others, no need to become a workaholic, no need to be unethical.

But no matter how hard I try to help and no matter how many people get to view this website, only a handful of people are ever going to take it all the way.  It doesn’t matter how many people offer their advice to help others make a difference, only a small number will give their all and create their own pile of win.

Are you one of that small number?  Are you an innovator?

Why do only a relative few manage to shine?  Some possibilities:

  • Other aspects of life (big and small) get in the way;
  • Not everyone develops (or recognises) a true passion for anything;
  • There seems too much initial work to be bothered;
  • Fear of failure / Not prepared to take a risk;
  • You want to succeed, but give up when gratification doesn’t come quickly.

People give all sorts of reasons why they haven’t managed to go the whole way.  Some are good reasons and some are just excuses.  I bet they all feel like good reasons at the time.

Uni gives you access to so many resources that it’s crazy.  No matter how small your institution is, you can enjoy a wealth of goodness without moving off campus.

And with so many digital tools at our disposal, you’re able to push your own brand without having to ask for anyone else’s permission.  You have the power to stretch out wherever you want.  The Internet and mobile technology isn’t just for reading what people are doing, discussing last night, building a farm or joining the mafia!

“Let yourself experience life with your eyes and heart and mind wide open.”
Robbin – Brains On Fire

I’m not suggesting that all you need to do to succeed is to believe in what’s possible and keep trying again and again (and again) until you’ve won.  It’s not that simple and it’s not practical.

But that doesn’t mean you should give up and not bother at all.  Many successful entrepreneurs succeed amid many of their failures.  They won’t dwell on the failures.  In fact, the failures will soon be forgotten except for:

  • The knowledge that they’re a step closer to finding another success;
  • The lessons they’ve learned that will hold them in better stead for their next venture.

Nothing is guaranteed and nothing is certain, but the only way you can find out what’s possible is to start doing stuff. Do it now!  Sure, you shouldn’t just run off without due caution and with no plan whatsoever, but you do need to begin somewhere.

After all, you’ll never find the perfect circumstances to suit your personal situation.  You’re in a better position where you are than if you wait until you’re somewhere else.

You’ve got more chances than you probably think.  But you’ve got to take them.  Don’t waste it away.  I missed plenty opportunities simply because I didn’t know better.  It’s a mistake I try not to repeat on a regular basis.  It happens sometimes, but I’d rather slip up occasionally and get back up than sit on my bum and do nothing at all.

What will you do today?

A question of introspection

I thought you might be bored of list posts so I thought I’d write an essay.  I’ll leave the lists for at least a few days. Deal?

Scott Young has recently asked a number of big questions on his website:

“Is the ideal lifestyle designed or earned?”
“Should you wander the world or build a home?”
“Does thinking about the ideal life actually lead to living one?”

Far from providing answers, these questions bring up yet more questions:

“If I think about the ideal life and it leads to one, did I design it or earn it?  How did my thinking really achieve this outcome?”
“If I wander the world and it’s an ideal for me, would I have found a different ideal had I built a home?  How do I define ‘ideal’?”
“Should I think about an ideal life, or eschew the idea altogether as a meaningless concept?  If I ignore it, will it destroy my life or make me happier?”

original photo by net_efekt

original photo by net_efekt

Too much searching for an ‘ideal’ life is dangerous.  There are only choices that are more or less satisfying.  Beyond our own choices are uncontrollable issues that we must live with one way or another.  Faced with uncontrollable changes, we still have to choose.

For example, Ben Casnocha was caught up in the recent Chile earthquake.  He was sleeping in his hotel room when the quake began and, almost amusingly, Casnocha remarks how “I had an instinct to walk over to my desk and grab my laptop. [I’m not sure what it says that my first thought was to protect my laptop, but there you go.]”

Being asleep, he didn’t know the violent shaking was an earthquake.  But he did make a quick decision, attempting to save his laptop from danger.  Faced with a sudden, uncontrollable situation, Casnocha still had to exercise whatever level of control still available to him.

What if he’d not even gone to Chile?  Does Casnocha’s experience make his life any more or less ideal? Probably not. Is he now less happy with his life decisions?  I don’t expect so.

Barbara Ehrenreich mentions the pursuit of happiness in her book, “Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & the World”:

“Happiness is not, of course, guaranteed even to those who are affluent, successful, and well loved. But that happiness is not the inevitable outcome of happy circumstances does not mean we can find it by journeying inward to revise our thoughts and feelings.  The threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world.  Build up the levees, get food to the hungry, find the cure, strengthen the ‘first responders’!  We will not succeed at all these things, certainly not all at once, but…we can have a good time trying.”

Ehrenreich argues that introspection alone doesn’t deliver happiness or successful choices.  It’s understandable that so many of us want to give great thought to our choices, since we only have one life.  We want our decisions to be good ones.

Therefore, a changing world and a short life means we miss out on far more than we experience. But does this matter?  I say not.  So long as we are practice proactive behaviours, we should experience enough.  Scott Young suggests we can work toward realising the goals we are most interested in by going beyond introspection and practising actualisation.

Take the choice of wandering the world or building a home; it’s an almost impossible conundrum.  I have chosen to build a home, while one of my best friends is currently travelling all over the world for the third time in a decade.  When not busy travelling, my friend was still jetting off around the globe on business.  I, on the other hand, have never worked more than a few miles away from my home.  The furthest abroad I’ve been from the UK?  France.

So I’m not a great traveller outside this country.  Yes, I’d love to visit the world, but I have a deeper love of the life I lead now.  Likewise, my friend would love to build a home, but she loves the travelling life more right now.  Our lives are far from ‘ideal’, yet it’s how we choose to live.  We’re happy with our choices so far.

photo by askthepixel

photo by askthepixel

Tim Ferriss, of “Four-Hour Workweek” fame, emphasises initial decisions as key to achieving the ideal lifestyle.  Perhaps he was just lucky with his decisions.  On the other hand, his ideas may appear to work so well because he frames the story of his life (and his decisions) so boldly.  Ferriss has discovered a personal formula for contentment that currently works for him.  Long may he live that happy life.

Scott Young is currently leaning towards wandering over home-building.  I believe that’s enough incentive to wander, because I know he thinks his choices through.  It won’t be an ‘initial’ choice; it will be an ‘interested’ choice.  This, armed with introspection and at least a bit of planning, can go a long way.

Initial choice doesn’t have to equal success.  Final choice doesn’t have to equal success for that matter.  Success doesn’t have to equal happiness.  Our struggle with choice and passion and success and introspection and anything subjective may be that that we often attempt to bring these concepts together as if they are intrinsically linked.  They certainly cross paths, but you can’t easily bring them together.  Unless you have a crowbar…

Perhaps ideal hasn’t got anything to do with perfection or the best choices.  Ideal may be simply put as a constant attempt to achieve contentment throughout life.  You could argue this is all we’re ever trying to achieve and I’m not about to argue with that.  But I would say it’s easy to lose sight of our true choices and what’s been seemingly chosen for us.

While introspection can help us consider and shape our goals, could actualisation bring us closer to implementing those goals, as Scott suggests?  If he’s right, it could be the closest we get to doing things precisely on our terms.