The Paradox of Failure

Everyone fails at some time in their lives and failure hurts, it undoubtedly leaves scars, mentally and emotionally.

Every day of my working life I see people sitting opposite me telling me about something that has failed in their lives, their relationships, their body, their treatment, their marriage, their business, or something else in their life. Some people are struck hard, sometimes there are tears, some become low and depressed, and to some degree most find it difficult to deal with what has just happened in their life, hence why they have come to talk to me.

Often people get stuck in their failures, some never recover, sometimes one failure can define the rest of their life. Only very few realise the paradox that failure brings with it.

The Bitter Truth

There’s no doubt that failure leaves a bitter taste in your mouth about the harsh realities of life. Yet the paradox is that there’s no bigger teacher than failure, and sometimes failure can be the only thing that gives you the feedback you need to point you towards success.

This Paradox of Failure is how failure can be good or bad (or bad then good) at the same time. We need to know how we can learn to use our failure to our advantage.

Most people experience failure as something that happens to them, something that arrives uninvited and leaves damage behind. That’s true, but it’s only half the story, the other half is what failure is trying to tell you, if you’re willing to listen rather than just react. That’s the part most people miss, they’re so busy grieving the outcome that they never interrogate the information.

Failure Gives Us Direction

There are times that without failure we wouldn’t have even known we’d made a mistake, failure can literally open our eyes to alternatives, what we need to change, and to the hard work that’s really needed before we succeed.

If we fail we’re alerted to things that wouldn’t be apparent if things hadn’t gone wrong, failure shows us where we don’t want to go, what we don’t want to do, and without a doubt what doesn’t work.

But there are also times when the direction from failure isn’t so absolute as being right or wrong.

An easy way to think about this is the analogy of a plane on autopilot, correcting its heading constantly, in tiny increments, all the way to its destination. Possibly in the same way our failures are there to correct our direction with gentle nudges along the way, pushing us and redirecting us towards our goal, a bit like the autopilot.

The key word there is correction, not crash or catastrophe. Most failures aren’t telling you that you’re fundamentally wrong and that you need to scrap everything and start again. They’re telling you that something specific needs adjusting. Your approach, your timing, your attitude, your assumptions, your actions. The people who extract the most value from failure are the ones who treat it like a diagnostic tool rather than a verdict.

Failure Makes You Stronger

Ask any meat head down the gym and they’ll tell you muscles only grow when they’re pushed to failure. They do this by pushing the weights until they can’t push any more. Then in the next training session (providing adequate recovery and good diet), their muscles adapt and are stronger and bigger and they can push more weight.

The point I’m trying to make is failure can hurt you, but it can also make you stronger, and it can make you grow.

There’s a biological principle at work here that goes beyond the gym, psychologists call it post-traumatic growth — the documented phenomenon where some people emerge from genuinely difficult experiences not just intact but feeling stronger, more capable, more resilient and often clearer about what actually matters to them. It doesn’t happen automatically, and often it requires help to process the experience rather than burying it.

But the capacity is there, the failure itself is often the raw material you need, what you do with it determines whether it destroys you or develops you.

How Children Learn

A child learns by trial and error, a toddler learns to walk by falling down and getting back up again. A child doesn’t stop trying after just a few attempts either. It keeps going until success happens. Then it moves onto something else.

Sometimes giving up is the only sure way to fail, often we forget that failure is more common than success. Even the best footballers in the world miss far more shots than they score, the message is they keep shooting at goal until the ball goes in.

Watch a child long enough and you notice something else, they don’t attach shame to the falling. They’re not embarrassed by it, they don’t interpret it as evidence that they can’t walk, they’re not embarrassed about who saw them fall. They just get up and try again, unfazed, with roughly the same level of determination they had before. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, most of us lose that, we start treating failure as information about who we are rather than information about what we need to do differently, and that shift is where the real damage happens.

Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone

When we learn something new we often have to step outside our comfort zones, and here is the bad news sometimes this also means that we’ll be more likely to fail, often we also have to be willing to fail before we even start, failure is a risk we need to accept before we start.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly (Robert F. Kennedy said that, not me.)

Often people don’t actually fail at their goals, they just fear the failure itself and because of this they fail to get started in the first place. Contrast this to a successful person because failure is almost never a stranger to people that really succeed, they just accept it and try anyway.

If you try nothing you’ll seldom fail, but you’ll almost never achieve anything either.

Being in your comfort zone is a comfortable place to be, and nobody’s arguing with that. But nothing grows there, the research on expertise consistently shows that meaningful improvement only happens at the edges of your current ability, in the zone where the outcome isn’t guaranteed, where you might get it wrong, where failure is genuinely possible.

The Fear of Failure

Mentally the only way to be released from the fear of failure is to have actually tried and failed and then got back up and tried again, and failure itself is often not as bad as your fear of it.

In business terms it’s said that it’s better to fail early, fail fast, and fail cheap, in life I like to think of the expression that failure is a teacher not always an undertaker.

It’s also said that the stronger the wind, the stronger the wood in the tree, because the harder things are, the more resilient we become. It’s this resilience that is what keeps us going in the face of adversity.

For us to learn to be resilient to face whatever life throws at us we need to learn how to take a few knocks along the way, we need to learn how to get back up again, we need the grit to keep going when everything around us is going wrong.

Here’s what most people don’t realise about fear of failure: the fear isn’t proportional to the likely outcome. It’s proportional to how much importance you’ve attached to succeeding. Which means people with the most ambitious goals often feel the most paralysed. The stakes feel enormous because the goal matters enormously, but the fear doesn’t reduce the risk of failure. It just prevents you from attempting things, which, as it turns out, guarantees a different kind of failure entirely.

Building Grit

Often your ability to weather past failures builds the grit you need to succeed. I’d even bet that the things you really want in life aren’t always going to be easy, and you’re bound to get some hardship if not failure along the way.

There’s an old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result — its origins are disputed and it’s often wrongly credited to Einstein, but the point holds regardless of who said it. The paradox of failure is about learning from your failure, adapting and then trying something new the next time.

There’s also that quote often attributed to Thomas Edison, usually told about the light bulb, that he hadn’t failed but had just found thousands of ways that didn’t work before he found one that did — though the story is better documented in connection with his work on the storage battery, and the number changes with every retelling. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb alone either; Joseph Swan demonstrated one in Newcastle before him, and the two later merged their British interests. Either way, the persistence is the point. Perseverance, resilience, and flexibility are perhaps the real traits that you really need for a really successful life, because all of us fail from time to time.

Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.

The Forced Hiatus

Failure gives you a chance to step back, to take a breath, to re-evaluate, to re-focus.

Sometimes we’re too busy being busy to be really productive, failure can give us a forced hiatus where there’s nothing left but to re-evaluate and take stock. It gives us time to regroup and to look for what is next.

Failure can teach us about ourselves far more than success ever could, with failure comes some harsh life lessons. Because failure is an honest teacher.

Success, if we’re being direct about it, is a terrible teacher, when things go well, you don’t know which parts of what you did made them go well. You just know they went well, failure is more specific, it points at something. It says an assumption was wrong, this relationship wasn’t right, this timing was off, this approach doesn’t scale, or you need to learn, improve and train harder. That’s uncomfortable information to receive, but it’s useful information in a way that success rarely delivers.

The Paradox

The paradox of failure, is that it can be bad and good at the same time.

It’s a bitter sweet lesson, that we can learn from, we can grow with it, it can help us build grit, resolve and perseverance. We can use it to direct us towards something better, and give us the pain and motivation we need to succeed. Because too few of us realise the hidden value of when we fail.

The Failure Trap

I see people get caught in the failure trap, they get stuck in their failures, they dwell in their failures, they take it personally or they blame others. They blame bad luck, and they get stuck in self pity for far too long, re-living their failures day after day to the extent that they let their failures exhaust and define them.

Fear of failure causes you to avoid taking action, it’s a self preservation thing, but it can also lead to you always taking the easier option in life. By never pushing yourself to be better, you stop growing, you never actually get better and in the end you just stop trying.

The failure trap is subtle because it disguises itself as caution. People stuck in it aren’t consciously choosing to stay stuck where they are, they genuinely believe they’re protecting themselves. But what they’re actually doing is accumulating a different kind of failure, the slow, invisible failure of a life that never tested its own limits. This type of failure feels less dramatic, it can feel safe, until one day it doesn’t and you’re left on the shelf and life has moved on and left you behind.

The Two Edged Sword

I see people scarred by failure, some change, some move on, some get stronger, others don’t.

The Paradox of Failure is a two edged sword, it hurts and it cuts deep, yet a few of us actually learn how to wield it to our own advantage. Don’t be afraid of failure, be afraid of never trying to get better.

Further reading

• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House.
• Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. New York: Scribner.
• Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Strategies for learning from failure. Harvard Business Review, 89(4), 48-55.
• Syed, M. (2015). Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes—But Some Do. New York: Portfolio/Penguin.
• Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323-370.