Failure in the Right Direction

Some people say that you must fail in order to succeed.  I think that's bad advice.  Failing can as easily crush you, your hopes and your dreams as much as it can teach you anything. 

I think a better motto  is that failing in the right direction can sometimes be helpful.

It’s not the failure itself that is helpful, but rather that sometimes within the failure are the raw materials of your success.   And you need raw materials if you hope to create a refined and beautiful finished product.  No raw materials and production shuts down.

I like to say:  “Excellence is the refinement of imperfect attempts.”

When we first start trying to accomplish a new skill  or behavior,  we're often in a stage of infancy.   Much like the early experiences of an actual infant, we feel helpless and uncomfortable because the:  sensations, ideas, mental concepts and physical skills that we need are not yet known to us.  

Think of an infant who can pee and poop,  but still doesn't understand what those things are, or how to control them.  Not too comfortable.  Not a feeling of being in control.  

Infants don’t even know what hunger is, or how to walk. 

It's a very difficult experience for a complex human organism to find itself in a helpless state. 

And yet, as we see with real infants, slowly, very slowly, over time, as they make efforts, and with a helpful environment, they come to be masters. of their  bodies. Slowly and steadily, if all is well, they become able to walk, to control their bodily functions.

In a very real way, developing higher levels of physical skills, whatever those are, whether they're

• learning to manage weight or body composition

• learning to perform a new exercise with good form

• dealing with aches and pains

• doing a new skill or trick  at a basic, intermediate, or high level
  

All of these require moving through a learning arc that often takes us from infancy to greater levels of control and maturity - slowly, and step-by-step.

Controlling the mind and the body  is very much a natural process - one that, like farming, often defies immediate gratification.

It’s also a process that has to be guided. 

In fact, that's the other thing that's often missing from the idea that failure is a good thing - the important detail that the environment in which you fail is very important!

When you’re in a helpless infancy stage  and you fail, you’re not able to make sense of what's happening, and that can be crushing and stop your progress altogether. 

But when you have more skilled and knowledgeable people around you who can be supportive, now you have guidance that can point you in the right direction.  And with guidance  that helps you  begin to break down and make sense of, in your mind, where you need to head and what you need to do and how you need to do it,  now that process of failure becomes something very different. 

We can even see this in children who, in the wrong environment, have developmental deficiencies, but in the right supportive environment, grow very well. 

An ER doctor once wrote  that  doctors are fond of complaining that patients come to the ER  without very serious medical concerns.  But he cautioned that ER doctors themselves are often chastised by radiologists for running many tests that seem unnecessary.  His point was that no one is a perfect diagnostician. 

To further elaborate he pointed out that in order to find life saving information through medical tests he ran, he had to accept a certain threshold of inefficiency and failed attempts.  What looked like unnecessary tests to the radiologists, to him looked like the correct number of attempts to find important information that saved lives

To put it in sports terms, if he was going to make 40 baskets in basketball, he needed to take 100 shots, of which 60 would miss. 

What I drew from this analogy of tests was that success requires a certain threshold of failed attempts.

Now, this all sounds like nothing new, but what is different is when you find you're in a particular physical practice or skill that you're developing and you're doing it in a regular way, day after day after day, there's a way in which it's much like farming, where you plant the seeds and a season later see them sprout out of the ground. 

In this same way when you're trying to get over a very specific technical problem, and you are practicing regularly, you can see how your immature practice attempts lead to the moments of greater control and success - and this helps you stay with the process. 

Figuring out or the refinement  of the things that you were doing crudely  is actually what makes you successful! 

So that, if you had given up in the infancy stage and completely stopped and made no more attempts that were awkward and difficult,  you wouldn't have made the discoveries that led to your success. 

In physical skill development as you get into the toddler stage, or your tween stage, or to your adolescent stage, or to your young adult stage, all of this plays out in front of your eyes in a way that you can see it, in a way that you can understand it.

You know and others can see that you have more control, more grace, more ability.  It’s visible. 

So moving beyond the obstacles in your life that you want to get past is not just about failing, because one can fail  without any understanding of how to fix things, how to change things, or what the failure means.   That’s no fun at all.  And just slapping on positive words or sentiments when you’re actually lost is no good either.  It denies reality.

Yet, failure becomes much more tolerable when you're seeing slow, incremental progress - what I call “micro progress.”.

Parents can be much more patient and much less worried when they know their child is just slowly developing, rather than if they think there might be something significantly stalled or actually wrong with the child's development.

And unfortunately, when most of us try to  approach a greater physical level of challenge, often our struggle and frustration and the way that human emotions are wired, cause us to chalk up our struggles and failures to our own deficiencies and something that is flawed in us.

I've done this myself. in learning more advanced physical skills, even with all of my understanding of this process. 

So the takeaway message  is that we can't ever get to a place where we don't need failed attempts.
If mixed in with our failed attempts, we're seeing that they are not just failed attempts, but they are actually the bricks with which we're building the house, the grist for the mill, the clay which is being turned into the support structure of what we're actually doing, then we are headed in the right direction.

So I would encourage people to

1)  Find a supportive and helpful environment with somebody who's further along than you that can give you that context of guidance and knowing where you're going wrong and what you need to head toward. 

Even when you get help, you'll still have to do much of the work of integration, just as everyone needs to learn to walk themselves, and everyone needs to learn to go to the bathroom themselves, and yet the outer support and guidance is crucial to getting through the infancy stage where you are most likely to give up.

2) As you get good guidance, good knowledge of what you're doing, and begin to look for how  - as you go through a period of training that is sufficient enough to give you the arc of development that you need to have perspective -  that you look and see how a certain number of failed attempts  is actually producing the very success  you yearn for.

Too often in life we encourage people, and reward people, and tell them to look for ease  and success, without teaching them - not  just to fail - but how to fail as part of a process of development that's headed in the right direction.

That is the lesson that we need, not in some general vague way, but with skilled guidance by knowledgeable people who have accomplished the things that we wish to accomplish. 

Not through magic. Not through wishing. Not through change of perspective.

But BECAUSE the rough attempts of prior practices - the ones that felt so babyish, uncoordinated and all over the place - ARE what get refined into skill.

Keep trying.
Get skilled and knowledgeable help.
And BELIEVE!