A Different Way of Looking At Failure
By: Brian Kim - December 21, 2006
Yes, you’ve heard the sayings about failure. Failure is there to provide you direction on how to adjust, failure’s a good thing, everybody who has succeeded has failed at some time, Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before he invented the light bulb, etc. All of these sayings on failure are well and true, but when you are actually in the moment of failure, when you have failed miserably after what seemed like tons of a hard work and preparation, all of these sayings just seem to go straight out the window. It doesn’t feel like a good thing. It doesn’t feel like its helping. It hurts and it hurts badly.
This is particularly true for those just starting out on the journey toward the accomplishment of their dreams. They have high hopes, great pictures in their mind, they take action, but when they come across their first failure, everything comes crashing down. Everything. They become disoriented, pessimistic, depressed and seem to have lost their entire drive within them. The truth is, all those analogies you hear on failure only sink in AFTER the fact, never in that particular moment. So how can we “frame” that moment I’ve just described, the moment that all of you will inevitably experience, the first failure that hits you hardest and tests you the greatest? How can we “frame” that moment to get a true look at it?
To get that frame, let’s look at failure when it comes to lifting weights. What I mean by failure in that sense is when you can’t possibly lift another rep. When you’re out to gain mass, you’re going to want to choose a weight that you can only lift ~8-10 reps per set. When you first find that weight and start lifting it, you will probably struggle on the 8th or 9th rep. You lift 8 reps and then you muster everything inside of you to get that 9th rep, but you can’t lift all the way. You’ve failed. You come home tired, sore, and upset at yourself because you couldn’t lift that weight. So you rest, recuperate, feed your body and head back to the gym one week later.
More often that not, when you lift that same weight again, you will probably be able to get that 9th rep in. Here’s the point though. You don’t know that you’re stronger than before UNLESS you go at it again. When you go at it again, THEN and ONLY THEN do you realize that you ARE stronger than before. Here’s another point I want to make. You were actually stronger the moment you failed, NOT after a week later. The moment you failed, you were stronger than before. You just didn’t realize it until you tackled it again.
It’s hard in that moment of failure to contemplate the realization that you are stronger, but you are. To verify it, all you have to do is go at it again and again and again. Sometimes, after one week, you may NOT be able to lift that 9th rep, but a couple weeks after that, I guarantee that you will be able to lift that last rep and move on to a higher weight.
That pain you feel after failing, it’s that in between time you have before lifting weights once again. That pain where you feel sore, where you can hardly lift anything. It’s normal. It’s there to make you stronger. Your muscle fibers have little tears and rips in them and they are now rebuilding with the intake of protein and sleep you’re providing your body. When you lift again, you’ll realize you’ll be able to reach your goal so the next time you hit failure and you feel the pain and soreness afterwards, you’ll realize it’s the same story as before, and it’s only a matter of time before you lift again that you realize again that you’re stronger than before.
Similarly, you will experience pain after you hit failure, but if you rest and feed yourself with more information, knowledge, experience, and ideas, the next time you go at it again, you’ll realize you are stronger than before because of it. It’s that time from the moment you fail to the next time you tackle your goal that makes you stronger than before, provided that you intend to go at it again. If you don’t, you’ll never realize that you were stronger than before and you’ll never start hitting that favorable cycle.
I think everybody’s first failure is the hardest to deal with. It has the most pain. It has the most discouragement. It hits you the hardest. It’s like when you haven’t lifted weights for quite some time and you have a hard workout session right out of the blue. Imagine the excruciating pain you will be in tomorrow. It’ll be unlike anything you’ve ever experienced but if you keep on doing it, the pain and soreness become tolerable and you actually begin to enjoy it because you know it’s a sign that you had a good workout.
Similarly, if you make the mistakes and experience failure, it’ll hurt like crazy the first time, but as you keep going at it, you condition yourself to respond less negatively toward it and you view it as that in between time where you can learn and rebuild before you go at it again and again.
That in-between time is probably going to seem like a long stretch of flat land where you fail to see any results. Long plateaus in between steps where it seems like nothing is getting done, but in reality, it’s taking you closer to the next level. It is precisely in these plateaus that most people give up because they are not seeing results. Look at the big picture. The first plateau is usually the longest plateau. After that, the plateaus seem shorter and shorter because of the accumulated knowledge and experience you gain as a result of traveling those long plateaus.
That’s why I recommend not telling anybody of your goals in the beginning, because it’s in the beginning where it seems like nothing is getting done, when no results are showing up that people on the outside will view that and discourage you from going on. It looks like you’re not moving but you are. You’re moving forward. Most people only check to see if you’re moving up, but that only happens if you go the distance of the plateau by moving forward. The example of plateaus and steps seem more of an accurate representation of how we feel during the journey because the plateaus signify long periods of time where it feels like nothing is getting done but all of a sudden, after you make the trip, you get to the next level and the next and the next.
Your first failure will hurt. Big time. It’ll likely happen during the beginning of your journey, at that long stretch of plateau before you go to the next level. However the moment you experience that failure, the MOMENT you experience that failure, you are stronger than before. It’s only when you go to tackle your goal again that you truly begin to realize it.
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3 Responses to “A Different Way of Looking At Failure”
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December 21st, 2006 at
[…] Failures Make You Stronger Search tags:failure, motivation successBrian Kim has just posted an excellent article about his Different Way of Looking At Failure. It resonates with some of my thoughts so much, that I decided to make my comments on this a separate post. […]
December 22nd, 2006 at
failures are merely the stepping stones to success. So hard to get that when you’re in the thick of it sometimes
Happy Holidays
GP in Montana
December 23rd, 2006 at
Agreed GP. It always makes sense when you look back.
Brian