How to Use Failure to Succeed

read time 7 minutes

Welcome to The Curiosity Chronicle, a weekly newsletter where I provide actionable ideas to help you build a high-performing, healthy, wealthy life.

Today at a Glance:

Here's an interesting thought: Failure is a skill. But unfortunately, failure is not a skill that any of us learn to develop in school. In fact, people who are high achievers throughout their school years are often the worst at failure in early adulthood, because they've never had to contend with it.
The system I developed to fail better—to handle, deconstruct, and use every single failure to set the conditions for future success: (1) Set a failure timer, (2) Become a scientist, (3) Time travel to the future, and (4) Take action.
Your entire life will change the moment you stop fearing failure as a foe and start embracing failure as a friend.

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How to Use Failure to Succeed

"I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." - Michael Jordan

Here's an interesting thought: Failure is a skill.

You can be weak at failure—allowing a stumble to derail your confidence, break your flow, and slow your progress.
You can be strong at failure—using the stumble to advance your knowledge, improve your edge, and win the next battle.

But unfortunately, failure is not a skill that any of us learn to develop in school.

In fact, people who are high achievers throughout their school years are often the worst at failure in early adulthood, because they've never had to contend with it. All of their experience tells them that success is a given.

Trust me, I've lived it: I had succeeded at school and baseball my entire childhood, but when I arrived at Stanford, I took my first proverbial "punch to the face" (both athletically and academically) and it rocked my world.

I studied for classes and still got Cs. I worked hard on the baseball field and still got beat. Every single failure drained my confidence, sapped me of energy, and convinced me that I might not belong. Each one felt like a crushing blow, sending me on an emotional wave that led to an increased likelihood of more failures.

After a painful first quarter, I realized that something had to change: I needed to learn how to use failure (rather than be used by it).

I know I'm not alone. We've all felt the pain:

A bad review at work that caught you off guard
Passed up for a promotion you felt you had earned
A weak presentation in front of the leadership team
Harsh feedback from a colleague or partner
A missed quarterly sales quota or target

Here's the system I developed to fail better—to handle, deconstruct, and use every single failure to set the conditions for future success.

The Failure System: 4 Steps to Fail Forward

1. Set a Failure Timer

Viktor Frankl has a brilliant quote that I love:

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response."

Our power in every situation is in the space that we can create between stimulus and response.

Creating that space is key in the wake of a failure: Force a pause, take a walk, gather your breath.

Zoom out. Don't inflate the size of the failure in your mind—most failures are micro details, not macro issues.

Give yourself a fixed amount of time (~24 hours) to feel frustrated or angry about the failure. During this time, you don't need to do anything but sit with the feelings and emotions. Allow yourself the grace of that period, but when the time is up, you move forward to the next step.

2. Become a Scientist

Once you've made it through your grace period, it's time to learn.

The aim is to view the failure through the lens of an unbiased, unemotional third-party.

You need to approach the failure as a scientist does an experiment:

Gather Information: What happened? How did it differ from my expectation?
Analyze Information: Why might this have happened? What elements of my process might have contributed to this outcome? What are the underlying insights from the unexpected result?

The important piece here is that the cold, emotionless, disciplined analysis establishes accountability for the failure that sparks you into your next action.

Becoming a scientist means determining the variables that are within your control, understanding them in detail, and focusing your energy on improving them for the next attempt.

3. Time Travel to the Future

Becoming a scientist requires you to zoom in—now, I want you to zoom out:

Imagine yourself one year from today. You're in flow, celebrating a great success. Looking back at the prior year, you point to the failure you just experienced as the turning point, as the critical moment that set the conditions for this win.

Ask your future self a few questions:

What actions did you take to make it so?
What changes did you make in your life after the failure?
What behaviors, mindsets, and routines did you adapt?

Use these questions to guide your actions in the present.

4. Take Action

In my experience, the hardest part of coming back from any failure is putting yourself back out there.

It's easy to stand on the sidelines—it's hard to stand in the arena:

"It is not the critic who counts...The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming...who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Teddy Roosevelt

Information is nothing without action. In the wake of a failure, default to action.

Remember: Action doesn't have to be perfect for it to be right.

Your Starting Line

Your entire life will change the moment you stop fearing failure as a foe and start embracing failure as a friend.

The world isn't run by perfect people who never failed.

The world is run by imperfect people who failed over and over again—but who used every failure to set the conditions for their future success.

Maybe that failure you just experienced isn't the end after all.

Maybe that failure you just experienced is your starting line.

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Sahil Bloom

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