You live, you rejoice, you have a lot of plans and suddenly... as in Olga Taranyuk’s song Black stripe, white stripe. And why does this always happen - after impudent joy, trouble bursts in? Fiasco. How can we survive failure then? Quite simple, because the desire for success is our destiny!
You strive, you spend your energy, and then you get tripped up! Fiasco, failure! And off we go, you start to get nervous, scold yourself for everything: for what you should and shouldn’t do. “Loser!”, “Why am I unlucky”, “An evil fate is haunting me, or maybe I’ve been jinxed?”, “My hands are not growing any better.” Stop! Stop! He who does nothing makes no mistakes! And Moscow was not built right away! It’s probably very rare that someone’s life goes by without a fiasco.
It is important to be able to admit defeat
Financier Bernie Madoff admitted that at first everything was great with his fund, then the situation began to deteriorate, and then it got really bad. And it all ended with him ending up in court, and not on the side of the prosecution. One mistake can provoke a disaster if we ourselves give up and go this way.
You must be able to admit defeat, even if you are afraid that this will lead to a loss of authority in the eyes of others. Yes, you will lose the title of a lucky person and a successful person in everything, but at the same time you will be able to stop the destructive situation and prevent the onset of catastrophic consequences. Honesty will help you successfully learn from your own mistakes and not repeat them in the future.
Don't be afraid to ask for help
If you understand that you are in a difficult situation, then you should not be afraid to ask for help. At the same time, do not forget that on occasion you will also have to help the person. The principle of dialogue works here: first they help you, and then you help. Otherwise, your benefactor may get tired of “playing with one goal.”
In one situation you will need to find financing, in another you will need qualified accounting advice, in a third you will need the help of an IT specialist. There is nothing wrong with not mastering everything yourself, but asking for advice or help from a professional. And you, in turn, can be useful to all these people in your profile.
Shape your environment wisely
In a difficult situation, how successfully you get out of it will depend on the people around you. If you have an unreliable partner working shoulder to shoulder with you and the situation cannot be changed, say goodbye to such a person without hesitation. In fact, assessing the people around you is not easy.
Try making a list of everyone you interact with on a regular or regular basis, and then think about how you feel about each of them. How comfortable are you with these people? Perhaps there are people on this list with whom you have a difficult history of interaction, not always positive. Try to limit or minimize communication with those who create problems for you and cause negative feelings.
How to stop being afraid and start living
The human brain is in constant work, regardless of external factors. Therefore, it is necessary to direct this impulse in the right direction.
Think in advance about the tasks that you will need to do in the near future. Maybe you had some unsolved tasks at work or wanted to start running?
Start to start performing, and don’t engage in self-immersion and self-digging over all sorts of nonsense. Write down in advance what needs to be done and calmly proceed to implement your plan.
Exercise helps many people. Write down your training plan, determine the amount of time you will devote, what exercises you will perform, and so on... So? Got a stream of thoughts? Constructive brain work helps to get rid of groundless worries.
In addition to the fact that you got rid of your worries, you also came closer to realizing your intended goal.
No to illusions, yes to realism
You need to understand that in life not everything and not always happens the way you would like it to. For example, Teresa Regan created about 20 books during the first 17 years of her writing, but all of them were rejected by publishers. And then Teresa decided to publish the book with her own money, and it eventually became a bestseller. The writer looked at life realistically; she understood that publishing houses didn’t like her work, but people would like it. That is why she made such a bold decision and seriously invested in its implementation.
If you are doing something that is not producing the expected results at this stage, you need to look at it through the eyes of a realist. No matter how much you like the project, if it does not live up to expectations, you should not continue to work on it. Or does it make sense to radically change the approach to its development.
Accept Failure
Considering yourself worthy of more at a time when others are seriously considering refusing your services is simply unreasonable and futile. It doesn't matter what you do or how you do it, people don't have to give you what you want. If you really deserve the best, then just prove it.
For example, Jan Koum, an outstanding programmer, was once rejected by the leadership of the social network Facebook. They refused to hire him. After some time, he created the WhatsApp service, which eventually sold it to Facebook for nineteen billion dollars. At the same time, he did not sit and suffer, demanding that the company recognize his talent. He just proved that he was worth something.
You need to be grateful for what you have at the moment. It could always be much worse. Don't demand more without leaving your comfort zone. The situation you find yourself in is solely the result of your own activities. Mobilize your strength, use your skills, capabilities and connections, achieve success without complaining or demanding anything from others.
How to survive failure at work?
It all depends on the nature of the failure. If it can be compared to a rake that accidentally met on your way, then nothing. Just apply ice to the bruised area and walk further, carefully looking at your feet - the road is long, and anyone who walks forward and does not stand still can stumble on it. But when the last failure is just a link in a chain of failures, where each subsequent trouble is larger and more fatal than the previous one, it’s probably worth remembering the old wisdom: don’t try to adapt to the circumstances, adapt the circumstances to yourself, if it doesn’t work, change the circumstances. Moreover, this formula is applicable both to changing jobs and to completely abandoning the type of activity in which you suffer one professional failure after another. Try (at least mentally) to look for yourself in something else. It's no secret that the best way to make a living is to turn a hobby into a craft.
Don't despair
Your brain instantly classifies this or that situation as failure or success. After some time, looking back, you may reconsider this assessment. And sometimes it turns out to be the opposite. Even if all the troubles befall you at the same time, do not be discouraged. In situations of particularly high nervous tension, try to switch off. Relax, do something unusual and completely meaningless. Laugh, joke, have fun, look for any way to change your mood for the better. Forgive those people who betrayed you or caused you any harm. Life is too short to waste it on grievances and sadness.
August 16, 2017
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Why are failures useful? How does failure contribute to success? Irina Tolmacheva shares practical advice on how to survive a bad period in life, and also become stronger and more successful with its help. Nobody likes to fail or go through a streak of bad luck, but no one likes to go to the dentist. Can failure be as good for success in life as going to the dentist is for your health? Bruce Grierson thinks yes, definitely. In the article “Surviving Bad Weather,” he gives vivid examples and arguments in favor of this theory. Below is a summary translation of this article.
The poet who made a career out of failure
The article begins with the paradoxical success story of Philip Schulz. He was born into a poor family, his father was an alcoholic. He only learned to read when he was 11 years old because he suffered from dyslexia. At school he studied in the “class for fools”, and even there he was an outcast. When asked what he wanted to become, he answered “A writer,” the teacher laughed in his face. All in all, a classic loser.
“All a writer needs is an understanding of himself and his feelings, the ability to identify true feelings and the courage to reveal them to the reader. And anyone can do this, even dyslexic. And so Schultz persistently moved forward to a career that everyone seemed absolutely inappropriate for him, to the career of a poet.
At some point, Schultz realized that everything he wrote about boiled down to failure, failure, defeat. Failure is the clay from which he molds his works. And this understanding pierced his poems with special energy. He compiled the newly written poems into a collection called Failure, with a bent nail on the cover. This collection won the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the world, in 2007.”
Who gets hired to work on Wall Street?
“A theory that completely overestimates the role of failure, failure, is becoming increasingly popular. Some psychologists, such as Jonathan Haidt, argue that adversity, failure, and even trauma are necessary for people to become happy, successful, and self-actualized.”
“Joan Rowling, speaking at Oxford about her life, described a classic black streak: divorce, condemnation of her parents, poverty on the verge of homelessness. All this brought her back to her old dream - to write books. She set out to realize her dream because she had nothing more to lose. “Failure peeled away everything that didn’t matter,” Rowling said, “and I learned things about myself that I couldn’t have learned any other way.”
“Steve Jobs believes that the three biggest failures of his life—being expelled from college, being fired from the company he founded, and being diagnosed with cancer—were portals to a better life. Each of them forced him to take a step back and look at his life as if from afar, to see the long-term perspective of his life. Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison expressed the same idea in different words.”
“Periodic failures in life are very important information,” writes Heydt, “when you read the biographies of great people, you notice that almost all of them had serious failures in life. That's why I'm so worried about Obama - he didn't have any particularly noticeable bad streaks in his life. It’s unlikely that he will make a strong president.”
“Some businessmen in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street have long noticed this feature of the human psyche and prefer to hire former athletes. And not because famous personalities attract clients. Athletes know how to overcome defeat. “We needed people who can show results and not get emotionally attached to failures,” one oil trader said in an interview, explaining why he employs so many former
jockeys."
Aircraft manufacturer who achieved success by crashing his planes
Paul McCreery, the famous aeronautical engineer, understood the practical value of failure and deliberately built his success on it. He competed for the Kremer Prize for creating the first aircraft powered solely by human muscles. He created a machine whose main competitive advantage was a safe fall, so that pilots could try again and again. And he received this award.
Pictured is muscleman McCreary.
How does failure contribute to success?
“Failure has consequences for our development as whole individuals. It can initiate a shift from seeking short-term happiness to long-term happiness. Let's say you become bankrupt. The “work and well-being” area has been hit hard. But the immune system of our psyche has a strategy in case of such a defeat. According to Robert Emmons, our lives have four basic dimensions: achievement, community, spirituality, and heritage. When one of the four dimensions fails us—such as achievement—the other three become stronger.”
“And so the once lone wolf, bulletproof and punchy as a bowling ball, is forced to throw his old life overboard and begin to build a new relationship with life. The concept of a “higher goal” takes possession of him. And, surprisingly, he begins to perceive the new life as a step forward. And failure thus leads to happiness. Heydt writes: “London and Chicago took advantage of the opportunity afforded them by the great fires to transform themselves into grander and more comfortable cities. People, too, sometimes take advantage of similar opportunities, wonderfully rearranging parts of their lives that they would never give up voluntarily."
9 ways to cope with failure easier
1. Don't take it to heart. Those who float back to the top the easiest are those who have a sense of humor. It's important to sense when you're starting to take yourself too seriously. “Fear of failure can paralyze and damage us,” says life coach Steven Berglas. “When my clients say, “I’ll die if I don’t win the Olympics,” I ask, “Really? Right on the court or later out of shame? And then the client understands that we are not talking about real death.”
2. Join us, gentlemen, join us. There are a huge number of sites and clubs that unite people who have suffered one or another failure. Don't keep everything to yourself. Talk to your fellow sufferers.
3. Feel guilt, not shame. Richard Robbins notes that the difference between guilt and shame lies in what we consider to be the cause of our failure. The cause of guilt is something I did. The reason for shame is who I am. In the latter case, you expect failures in the future and will not make efforts to avoid them.
4. Cultivate optimism. Hamlet said that nothing is good or bad, it is what we think that makes it so.
5. Don't ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, John Kennedy said. Potland radio station sales manager Margaret Evans suddenly lost her job. While she was posting her resume to look for a new job, it suddenly occurred to her that this was the opportunity she had been waiting for all her life. She always dreamed of doing something useful for others, of living an unpretentious life. She signed up as a volunteer to work in orphanages in Belize. “It turned out to be the highlight of my life,” Evans says.
6. Lower your demands on yourself. Gilbert Brim begins Ambition with the story of his father, who lived in the countryside. When he was young, he maintained the entire forest adjacent to his home in perfect condition. But as he aged, he reduced his area of responsibility. In the end, he only had flower pots left on the windowsill, but his flowers were always in perfect condition. So instead of failing in an area you were once a master at, you continue to have success, but on a smaller platform.
7. Keep a diary. Jamie Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, studied middle-aged engineers who lost their jobs. Those of them who shared their sorrows in a diary found new jobs faster. And it’s not that they were letting off steam or motivating themselves to look for work more actively. They simply analyzed the situation, could come to terms with being fired, which made them more reasonable, positive, balanced and attractive to employers.
8. Don't blame yourself. Self-flagellation - how
rust. The more you blame yourself, the deeper you sink into depression.
9. Take action! Failure is an opportunity to change direction. Don't miss it.
In my collection of quotes there is a wonderful statement from the great basketball player Michael Jordan: “During my career, I missed more than 9 thousand goals. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I was trusted to make the winning shot - and I missed. Throughout my life I have been wrong again and again and again. And that's why I was successful."
The only small problem is that a streak of failure makes only a few strong and successful. Many people break under the weight of failure.
I really hope that understanding the usefulness of the black streak will help you more easily survive it when it comes, and fall into the first, and not the second, group of people described above.
