The Boogeyperson (Notes on Failure)
“I'd love to tell you that this [email, sent 3-weeks later than it should have been, without the article you’re hoping would be attached,] isn't indicative of the way things have been going over here, of late, but this is supposed to be an Op-Ed on failures, right?”
I wrote Model D’s Editor on July 7th at about 12:15 AM. The email is a long-winded amalgam of self-deprecation and shame – an attempt to explain why I was so late delivering this article, and how that played into a perspective on failure that has plagued my life and career, and how I’m trying to change my mindset.
The cliff notes: “Failure,” too often, is a warped looking-glass; an inappropriately binary, self-assessment.
The idea of a looking-glass self, paraphrased and adapted, is that when we see ourselves (in our minds), often it is as we expect other people see us.
We look at the rubrics and standards we’ve fallen short of (or, I suppose, exceeded, but this is my article and I don’t personally know what it’s like to exceed a standard I’ve set).
In our mirrors, we are the weight that shouldn’t be hanging from our bodies, the skin that’s oily, teeth that are not perfect and straight and white, the things we said wrong yesterday, things that are too big, things that are too small – we see that we aren’t millionaires at 30 like we told our high-school classmates we would be. We’re closing in on 35, now, and it seems less and less like we’ll be able to retire immediately thereafter, as was our original plan. We have failed all of the past-versions of our projected future best-selves.
Failure, for everyone I’ve met, is a reflective property.
I’ve never in my life heard someone use the word “failure” to describe another person who actually tried to do something -- that is, of course, outside of caricature representations of slightly-shady-tough-loving aunties going off on main-plot characters on silver screens… And even then there’s usually a reconciliation point later in the script where they explain “it’s not that you’re a ‘failure,’ you’re just not giving yourself a chance to succeed – because you’re acting stupid. Stop holding yourself back.” Then they hug, and nephew/niece has a self-betterment montage on the way to their eventual “win scenario.”
In real life, people say all kinds of messed up stuff about us, but it’s usually not “look at this failing failure of a human being.” That’s not to say that we always (or ever) know how to help and support each other – especially within our economic decisions – but, you have to work really hard to generate active naysaying… and to the literal point I’m making here, not even your haters – I promise – no one is sitting at home or elsewhere calling you “a failure.”
No, no, beloved: “Failure” is a title you judged, juried, executed, and decided to carry around with you all by your onezie (I’m speaking to myself, here).
(Maybe I’m just a crazy person. It’s cool. You can stop reading if none of this resonates…)
So why are we so obsessed with failure. Why are we so terrified by it?
Easy answer? Because we’re narcissists, and somewhere, it’s just easier to think about ourselves outside of the reality that at any time, each of us is one of seven or 8 billion people currently living on Earth. We are obsessed with the idea that not only are we each snowflakes, but that some snowflakes are “objectively” better than others. And whether or not we admit to ourselves that this is a race, we all tend to embody the immortal words of Ricky Bobby -- we want to be first, not last. (This is a whole article in itself, but let me get back on track, here…)
At this point, I’m convinced that we are dealing with a word misunderstood – which is especially problematic because it’s also a word we almost exclusively use internally – and inappropriately constrain to a point of binary evaluation. We use the word as though our life is a pass/fail course. I mean, I suppose at end-of-life you could force an objective net-positive/negative evaluation to determine that someone was or wasn’t a failure, but it’d be really tough (case in point: Is our president a failure?). In any case, it’s certainly damn-near impossible to evaluate while your lungs are working. And yet, we do. Constantly.
I dropped out of high school. I dropped out of college. I started writing a book (I stopped writing the book). I started recording an album (I stopped recording the album). I started a company (it didn’t work). I started another company (it didn’t work). I lost a promotion opportunity (and the job all together) because I had never gotten my GED. I got a GED (at 26). I started another company. It went really really really well, until we got buried in cease and desist orders by the state of Michigan alleging we had committed umpteen securities violations (we proved that we hadn’t; it then didn’t work).
I turned 31 in June. I’ve pretty much set most of my romantic relationships on fire (#foreveralone), and have some honestly-not-terrible-but-totally-anxiety-inducing debt to show for the various entrepreneurial attempts and adventures I’ve made and been on.
My crowning achievement, most days, seems to be the fact that I haven’t starved or actually fallen on an actual sword throughout my adult life-to-date.
I give you this self-immolating recap of my past 13-14 years because despite the fact that by so many objective metrics I feel justified in considering myself a failure, I actually can’t think of anyone who would describe me as that. That’s not a humble brag. I can think of lots of people who don’t like me, much. But on the long list of warts and flaws, I just don’t think (hope, pray, and please don’t pop my bubble) that anyone would call me a “failure,” no matter how much feeling like one has defined my life.
This article is actually appropriately timed (God tends not to make as many mistakes as it feels like we do). I’ve been thinking a lot about the things that happen to us when we are consumed with fear, especially within entrepreneurship – and often within a low-to-moderate income demographic filled with people of color (read: Detroit).
Much more interesting to me, despite what the long-winded pre-amble above might lead you to believe, is the fact that thinking about failure as a binary, death-sentencing, singular event has a problematic impact on the way we look at success and ourselves. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m looking at my fellow entrepreneurs of color, but the theory generally applies much more broadly.
Especially as people of color, we are trained to make safe choices. We are conditioned to survive (or succumb) to flagrant school-to-prison pipelines, presumptions of guilt, police encounters, and implicit biases in job interviews (and most other places, too). We are taught that when you have a “good thing” like food, and shelter, and clean water (depending on what county you live in), that you should double-down, and protect it. We are taught to be risk-averse, and the ugly beast of a boogey-person who lurks on the other side of risk is named Failure.
We are taught not to dream big, not to quit stable jobs, not to concern ourselves with building new wings, and not to jump off cliffs, because – and it is implicit in the wary knowledge passed down from the ancestors – that we will fail (and die, or otherwise fall victim to a world not built for us).
We are taught, frankly, that risk is for white people (there are skydiving and board game jokes, here).
We are taught lies.
(To be fair, it’s not only black folk who are given these constructs, I would just argue that we suffer more from the systematic integration of them.)
Yes. Lies. All of them.
And maybe the most damning of all is the often-unchallenged notion that the entrepreneurial problems, hurdles, setbacks, set-ups, pitfalls, fall-throughs, and plain bad luck are all close kin to our aforementioned boogey-person homie Failure.
But wait… The fundamental purpose of a business is to bridge a gap, or solve a problem, right? Entrepreneurs succeed by “fixing” market failures at a level of proficiency worth paying for (as opposed to a theoretically more arduous status quo). Rarely do businesses create something truly “new,” but rather, they solve a need that has been solved before, but in a “better” way. It, therefore, doesn’t take much logical deduction to realize that fundamentally businesses exist to address failure – if your brain is spinning, it’s because we haven’t really given ourselves many easy “wins,” here, logically speaking. The point, here, is why would we assume that the thing built to solve the problem can’t have problems of it’s own? It’s as if we think we’ve failed as soon things become less than a cake walk, or smooth flight.
I’m about to deliver the let-down of the century. I know, I’ve built this up. But here it goes: I don’t have a solution, for you. But I do hope that sharing some thoughts of my own regarding how I diagram the problem in my personal life has helped you do the same.
One positive step that I have taken, of late, has been to just speak some of this stuff to myself, aloud, in hopes of forcing my brain to recognize the subtle differences in language we can use to frame ourselves (and our ventures). Our language, so often, informs our thought processes around faulty assumptions that we don’t even realize we are reinforcing.
I remind myself of these regularly:
Words and specificity matter. It is far (far) easier for a business to fail than a human to fail… A business failure is simple: There is no more resource to pursue “the things.” You ran out of steel for the bridge or some other metaphorical mettle that it would have taken to finish / float / fly. It’s okay. It happens. There are entire articles (books, sub-genres) about people who have failed in businesses on the path to eventual success that came before you, and if you’re lucky, there will be articles about your failures for the folks who deal with these same dilemmas in 20 years.
Every business (and person) has problems. Great businesses find ways to solve those problems, which for the most part are not unique, in new ways that give them advantages over the other people who have tried to do it. So stop being shy about them. They are NOT indicators that you are failing, or a failure. Seek help, talk to people, get advice, talk to more people -- this is the job. These problems are what will make you great, and these problems are to be expected (read: not an indictment of you, just what comes next).
If this were easy, we would all be millionaires.
Trust yourself -- and this one is huge -- logically, you couldn’t trust a failure, so the sooner you can remind yourself that you’re not a failure, the sooner you can get back to trusting your greatness.
Repeat the affirmations and positive steps outlined in 1-4.
The take-away, I hope, is that by recognizing failure to be what it is (internal motivation), hopefully we can distance ourselves from the fears, and start making better choices regarding our businesses and lives. Entrepreneurship is a lonely, boobie-trapped path along the side of the jagged cliff that we jumped from. We are carrying our wings and dreams as we descend into a canyon, before -- if we are among the few -- we can climb back up the other side and tell people “we made it.” Just like all of the successful entrepreneurs before us, we’ll tell people how hard it was, we’ll tell people that it didn’t work, but they won’t remember the part where we tell them about how we didn’t fly across the gaps, but that we fell down and then climbed back up. We will tell them that it doesn’t work the way you plan it…
They won’t listen. None of us do. We are dreamers. They will just hear that we built wings, and it worked out okay in the end (that we weren’t failures, like they fear they are), and they’ll build their wings and walk up to the cliff.
The best thing we can do -- now and then -- is welcome the questions, embrace the problems, and hope that somewhere, someone, will listen to us when we say (over and over and over again) that we are here to listen and talk to them through the things that scare them. We will tell them to hire consultants, and rely on experts, and use their networks. We will try to create as many success stories as possible from the group of people who follow us, if only because it will mean there are that many more survivors available to answer questions like for the next batch.
And if we’re lucky, we can help them unlearn their fears.
In the words of someone smarter than me:
“Failure, if it is anything, is about not trying, not about not succeeding.”
This article originally appeared in shorter form on www.modeldmedia.com. This was the original version that I wrote, but it was (as you might see) long as shit, so it had to be paired down. Thanks to the editorial staff over there for helping me get this in at a word count that was postable, but for anyone who wanted the full-text, I wanted to share.
Be great.
-Niles Heron
