Moment 23 - Why You Should Embrace Failure: Elizabeth Day

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Failure is something which we will all inevitably meet throughout our lives, yet it’s something we all seem to have an incredibly toxic relationship with. Elizabeth Day is the author of ‘Failosophy’ and host of ‘How To Fail with Elizabeth Day’ so it’s no surprise that Elizabeth has a thing or two to say about failure. In this ‘moment’ from the podcast, Elizabeth and I read a couple of her 7 principles on failure from her book. Episode 77 - https://g2ul0.app.link/Iv9fxRGJzjb Elizabeth: https://twitter.com/elizabday https://www.instagram.com/elizabday/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  I want to talk about failure.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:06Steven Bartlett?

  Now, which seems like a good thing to talk about. And in your book Philosophy, you you list seven failure principles. So I'm sure you've done this a million times, but I think it's a good, good place to start. So the seven failure principles.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:22Steven Bartlett?

  Number one, failure just is.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Yes, so that actually just feeds in with what we were talking about, which is the idea that failure is a fact, it's inevitable, it's going to happen to all of us. No matter how much we try to avoid it, I guarantee that it will happen. And that can feel scary, but it can also feel liberating because once you've accepted it as a fact, there's no point in trying to avoid it. So you might as well take the risk. So acceptance of failure starts with the observation of it. Failure is a fact, but how you respond to it is within your control. Whether you decide to feel like a failure for many years after the thing that's happened, or whether you think to yourself, okay, well, that's taught me something and I'll do it differently next time.

• 1:05Steven Bartlett?

  I guess the risk there is one bad failure and people stop trying.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:10Steven Bartlett?

  And then I was thinking, this is very similar to confidence in the way that like, if you have one bad failure, your performance, next time you get an opportunity, if you actually don't manage to just avoid it completely, will probably be worse because of nerves and that, you know, the memory of I'm terrible.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25Steven Bartlett?

  And then that's going to increase your chances of failing again. And then the kind of like self negative reinforcing cycle kind of continues and your confidence and your sort of, yeah, your guts kind of cascade downwards and can, for some people, work in the other direction where you have a success, your confidence builds, you walk on stage to do that, you know, public speech next time around with a bit more confidence, you do a better job, which increases your chance of success and it cascades upwards. Is that how failure works from your experience?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  It can work like that. I mean, to take the example you've just given, one of the ways of looking at that, if you're then stuck in a downward cycle and you're failing and you're trying at the thing, is that you're therefore in the wrong situation. So you're in the wrong workplace, for instance, that that isn't generous enough to like, make you feel okay after your failures, or doesn't make you feel like you can be your true self, in which case I would argue you need to remove yourself from that situation and find the place that does suit you. Or it can be a question of mindset and a question of applying that mindset that we've just talked about, which is, okay, I failed, I'm feeling in a downward spiral. How much of that is fact? That's a very difficult thing to do on your own when you're

• 2:32Speaker 01

  a very low Ebb, and that's why I'm a huge advocate of therapy. And again, I know that I come from a privileged place where I can afford therapy. But even if it starts with reaching out to your friend and talking about it, or reaching out to your work helpline and talking about it, or texting, shout the mental health charity, or calling the Samaritans, that's a really valuable step. And the other thing that I would say there is that I'm very aware that my definition of failure, which is what happens when life doesn't go according to plan, has a fatal flaw, which is that sometimes there are failures that are totally cataclysmic, that we couldn't possibly have predicted, that go against

• 3:15Speaker 01

  any plan whatsoever, like a global pandemic, like a terrible illness that you contract, like the death of a loved one. It would be monstrous for me to sit here and say, those failures are as easily assimilated, or learnt from, or dealt with, as fading your driving test. And so I'm not saying that at all. Those kind of failures will require a process of mourning and coming to terms with the thing that you've lost. And that's absolutely right and as it should be. My only thing is, the way that I choose to live my life is, I mourn, but I don't have to constantly relive the pain. I can still feel sadness

• 3:59Speaker 01

  about something, but I don't need to live in that place of reliving it constantly.

• 4:04Steven Bartlett?

  Becoming a victim?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and becoming defined by that. I can choose to be defined by something else. I can choose to be defined by my response to it. I can choose to find some kind of meaning in something that was meaningless at the time. And that's how I choose to live my life, because that makes it less sad. And I, and I think that that choice is available for most of us.

• 4:30Steven Bartlett?

  So point number two in your book is, almost everyone feels they have failed in their twenties.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  I mean, not you. Okay, so Stephen Barlow, I'm pretty sure. Do you think you failed in your twenties? Probably personally, sorry.

• 4:42Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, multiple, no, no, it's a good question, actually. Multiple times, yeah. Started my first business at 18, it was clearly a failure. Left that when I was 20 years old. Failed in those relationships, failed every day in business. Not the big, like, momentous failures, other than my business, that one would assert. But no, I failed probably more than anybody, to be fair.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  I think that's so great to hear. And also, I think that a lot of people struggle in their twenties, particularly in this day and age, because of the curse of comparison and because we live in a culture of curated perfection, where you're constantly comparing yourself to your peers' filtered appearance on Instagram and the life that they seem to be living. So we're comparing our insides with everyone else's projection of their outsides.

• 5:25Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  And for many people, although I know not you, but for many people, it's the first time that they've come out of full-time education and come out of a system of exam and reward, exam and reward. And there is no exam that you can sit to show that you're being a good grown-up. So you feel quite lost, plus piling on top of that, the pressure to find your passion, to like, make a career for yourself, but also to earn enough to pay your rent, living in house shares, like, just trying to make your way and trying to forge your identity in this day and age. It's just so hard to do all that at once. And then you're like, oh, and I should be having like, a thriving personal life and I should either be in a long-term relationship

• 6:10Speaker 01

  or having wine night sounds and making footloose and fancy free and drinking loads. And then at the weekend, making vegan brownies because I got to watch what I eat and all of that sort of stuff. And it's exhausting. And so really, what I wanted to say in that failure principle was that so many people come on in podcasts and say that they feel they failed at their twenties. And I think a lot of us fall into the trap, and I did too, of believing that we had to have our life sorted out by then. And actually, your twenties are a decade of transition, of discovering who you are, of grinding up the spices of life in your pestle and mortar. And the older you get, my experience has been, the more you know yourself and the more you know what you want to do, and that's where success lies. I've had so many more opportunities after leaving my twenties behind in the rear-view mirror.