Failure one year on

Reflections on a viral essay

This week, I wrote about my loathing of sportwashing in football for CapX, which you can read here. As a reminder, the Sunday extra post for paying subscribers drops Sunday too.

Now on with today.

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The title of George Orwell’s great early novel of failure serves as a motto for dealing with it

A year ago I published an essay about failure. Widely shared, it remains by far the most-read edition of this newsletter; indeed, it has more than twice as many views as its nearest rival, this dissection of the comedian Stewart Lee¹. Almost inevitably, the echo the essay found led to further commentary from me on the subject; podcasts here and here, and even holding a workshop on failure and how to respond to it. Before you react with a too readily ironic ‘Nothing succeeds like failure!’, a repeat of the seminar had to be cancelled due to lack of attendees.

It’s clearly the case that this essay, more than anything I’ve written, resonated with people. I have of course asked myself why. Many people have contacted me since to say that they share its sentiments, people who’ve experienced difficult professional setbacks and and are to a certain extent still dealing with them. As a general impression, it doesn’t feel like these people have been offered a space in which to honestly represent their experiences of failure, and are instead limited to endless narratives of preserving and finally breaking through; culture about failure is almost by definition created by people who have, whatever the build-up to it, succeeded.

The paradox of this subject is that perhaps any truly accurate representation of failure in media res would go unheard. A person who has succeeded at something now recalling their days of struggle has a very different outlook than someone who is persevering through years of obscurity with no end in sight - and for many, an end to a sense of failure never comes.

For myself, I’ve been trying to use the interest in my writing around this topic to steer its discussion in a more realistic direction. Though I haven’t achieved the success I’ve sought professionally, I have now kept going for over twenty years and that keeping going has become easier with time.

It’s important to make clear that I’ve never wanted to feel like a failure, and that I much prefer success to its alternative; I just find it enduringly absurd to try and create a positivity culture around an inevitably unpleasant part of life. Nobody would think it was appropriate to try and create a positivity culture around the common cold, when any good advice would be to acknowledge you’re under the weather, drink fluids, and get well as soon as you can.

In all the appearances above, I’ve argued against the idea of turning your failures or indeed your whole life into a narrative. By this I mean to avoid thinking that a row of disappointments means the universe now inevitably ‘owes you one’ and will come through you this time. In reality failures can stack up for years and years just as successes can arrive out of nowhere. Likewise failure can suddenly break a string of success; this is even harder to deal with, in my view, as people on successful runs can easily slide into feeling themselves immune to setbacks. Making it almost existentially distressing when setbacks arrive.

Meanwhile failing and failing, but expecting the next thing to work out due to story logic, means failure has more hold over you than necessary, and makes you still dependent on particular outcomes for your sense of self-worth.

In the meantime a lot of people suffer in silence or suffer in the public silence of feeling compelled to demonstrate to people that things are going well. We are not allowed to acknowledge that, even in circumstances where we have on the surface clearly positive aspects of our lives, not getting the things we want most and that we know in our heart we want most can add a melancholy aspect of life. You can trick the world that you’re alright with how things played out, but it’s harder to fool yourself.

Failure is a great teacher, but it only has a few lessons – don’t be a dick, remember other people, accept what’s out of your hands - and once you’ve absorbed those you can be stuck in its classes for a very long time. Indeed stuck there with no sense that hard work will get you up a grade. Therefore your narrative around failure and success has to be adaptable and flexible enough, has to be at core honest enough, to survive lean times.

Yet being honest also involves acknowledging success. Even if just a couple of things work out a year, as you endure you start to be able to look at this thing or that thing and say, Well, I did get this, I did get that. Over the years they accumulate in a way which makes you feel you’ve had somewhat more of your share. The key to getting through that is, as one of my workshop participants said, grit. Grit is about finding a way to go on with the right balance of a lack of expectation and humorous optimism.

There are different kind of failures than the ones I’ve been addressing, and they’re the ones our culture prefers to talk about; self-sabotage, for example, or the failure of refusing to apply or do things because of the fear of failure. These are the kinds of issues a life coach or therapist can genuinely help you with, getting you into a place to attempt to succeed.

However, our culture addresses these in part as a way of avoiding talking about a more difficult and arguably harder kind of failure: The one when you’ve done everything right. Your funding application might be the best, your novel submission the best-written, or that job interview absolutely the best you could have done. And you still don’t get it.

The idea that ‘Well, at least you tried your best!’ is going to be any kind of consolation for people in such scenarios is not how humans work. And yet that is genuinely our most common advice to people in that situation. The first thing to start with is by acknowledging that it sucks. However, I think most of us can aspire to be the kind of happy failures who in the old Churchill line go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm and recovering quicker from failure each time.

Personally I feel less of a failure since I wrote the essay. It’s been clear to me that there’s more interest in my work, there’s been more positive developments in my career, I’ve had - as a friend of mine defines their own metric of success - better conversations. Achieving those goals makes me just as happy as I suspected it would. Most people react to success like that. Success is nice.

Failure is still, of course, my constant companion, but over time I am able to bring in more and more of the elements I want into my own life. In some way the great frustration of failure is to stop us becoming, to paraphrase Neil Tennant, ‘the creature that we always meant to be.’

It still feels like there’s a lot of untold suffering out there, pent up by a culture of inappropriate positivity. And frankly the absurd international influence of American positivity culture doesn’t help. ‘What do I love about failure?’ Nothing. Failure isn’t an experience we should ever try to present as good.

Personally, I’m going to keep trying to help people minimize the damage that a sense of failure does to their lives. After all, in its small way my own case shows that the past does not have to be the guide to be the future. This isn’t so much optimism as a hard-won equilibrium. Yet there sure is an awful lot of suffering to get through to arrive at such balance, in which process a good attitude to failure can at least sort out the inevitable harms from the voluntary ones.

Every Ko-Fi makes me feel less of a failure than before

1. The subjects of Stewart Lee and failure are, on some deep yet ineffable level, linked.