Look ma! I failed!

We're never too old to fall in love with failure.

I’m not sure when, but at a certain age, we only do things at which we will be good. We don’t have to be pros immediately, but we refuse to be embarrassed. Living this way has staggeringly huge consequences.

If we are unwilling to risk being terrible at something, our human experience will never enlarge; it will only shrink. Instead, we’ll ease into smaller and smaller channels of existence until we’re in the final one of nonexistence: a coffin. Wow, Rob, that was dark.

Well, indulge me for a moment; let’s ask ourselves, are we prematurely and voluntarily choosing to be in a narrow and confining experience, not that unlike the one we try to avoid most: a coffin?

Moreover, there’s a reluctance to admit this is how we do life. We like to think we’re fun-loving, adventurous, and willing to take risks. We’re brave. I mean, we jumped off a high dive once. (we were nine, but hey, that’s who we are forever; that’s how immortality at the city pool works, right?). Heck, we stayed at an Airbnb thing a few years ago. And that’s new. Airbnb is fourteen years old, by the way. In today’s internet age, that’s fifty-three.

But let’s make this real: When was the last time you tried something and struggled to get it? Not be great at it, but when you tried it, you failed miserably? And as a follow-up, when you failed, did you make another run at it or walk away hoping no one witnessed your performance?

This strikes at the heart of the issue for us. What is our appetite for failing? And what does that say about the way we see the world? And ourselves.

Our parents (God love them), our teachers, our family, and anyone who loves us never wants us to fail. And that’s where they may have set us up for failure. Or the premature coffin.

What’s our appetite for failure?

I’ve been tackling some deep-seated mental patterns for me and, in so doing, have intersected with the work of Dr. Judson Brewer. His book Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind has my highest recommendation. I’m sure he’s overwhelmed by the honor. Implementing his work to tackle some of my mental habits has been like faceplanting in front of every crush I had growing up. But, even with that experience, I can’t recommend something more that I’ve colossally failed at (failed at for now, at least).

I will now, with zero shame and against the advice of my legal counsel, audiobook a few paragraphs from his book. He states, better than I ever could, the gist of trying something new and what it tells us about our mindset. But, hey, he’s quoting another writer. Nothing is original.

In Chapter 12, Dr. Brewer writes:

Dr. Carol Dweck is a Stanford researcher who coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. Dr. Dweck defines fixed mindset as when you believe your basic intelligence and abilities are immutable: you’ve got what you’ve got and have to utilize them the best you can. Growth mindset, on the other hand, is a belief that your abilities can be developed and improved over time…

If you believe your success is based only on innate ability, basically what you were born with, you would fit into the category of a fixed mindset. On the other hand, if you believe that progress is based on hard work, learning, and training, you are said to have a growth mindset. What mindset do you identify with most?

You might not even be aware of your habitual mindset, whether you are more on the fixed or growth end of the spectrum, but you need only look as far as your behavior to get a sense of what it might be. This often becomes very clear when you look at your reaction to failure, for example. Fixed-mindset individuals dread failure because it is a negative statement about their basic abilities and a reminder of their inherent limitations. On the other hand, growth-mindset individuals don’t mind or fear failure as much because they realize their performance can be improved; indeed, learning comes from failure.

This makes sense because if you believe that you were born with your particular intellectual capacities, for example, every time you fail, it’s a reminder of how limited you are. “Oh, I can’t do any better, this is as good as it gets for me.” On the other hand, if you have a growth mindset, you can see failure as a learning opportunity instead of as a failure.

Let’s use an example of walking down the sidewalk. If you have a fixed mindset and trip on something, you might beat yourself up for being a clumsy person. In the same situation, if you have a growth mindset, you might say to yourself, Hmm, I tripped. What can I learn from this? In a growth mindset, you can even question the notion of failure itself a bit. What does it mean to fail? If you learn, does what happened count as a failure?

Dweck even argues that the growth mindset will allow a person to live a less stressful and more successful life. This also makes sense, because in a growth mindset, you’re always learning and gaining from your experiences… Dweck advises, “If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, seek new strategies, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.”

I love her phrase enjoy effort. It’s kind of hard to enjoy what is happening when we are clenching our teeth together as we try to force something to change, as we beat our heads against the wall. But what happens when we start getting curious about our experience, loving the challenge, getting intrigued by the mistakes?

To include that much of a book I didn’t write is likely a copyright violation, but until my attorneys have been contacted, I’m giving it to you. I love the sting I felt from the term: slaves of praise. Someone, please start a band by that name. If you already have a band, please name your next album, or maybe write a poem with that for a title.

I hope this theft in broad daylight gave you a sense of the influence of our mindset on the act of failing our way into a living differently. And I hope you’ll hazard trying something new soon. Let me know in the comments how it went. I want to hear of the flaming crash landings, even if they don’t lead to some tidy three-bullet point takeaways.

What would our conversations be like if we stopped showcasing our Instagram-ready, humble brag, smooth experiences that are really just public relations social ladder-climbing exchanges masked as conversations with friends? Give me more faceplants. It tells me your mindset is bigger than your reputation for always winning.

Be well Feral Souls.