I was reading this great book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans called Designing Your Life. Towards the end of the book, they bring up the idea of “fear of failure”, something I have struggled for a good part of my life. 

Failures are not absolute

Reading the chapter there, and thinking a bit more myself, I realized that fear is very much a relative term. There is no absolute success and no absolute failure. You always fail at something (call that X) in order to achieve Y which you are trying in order to achieve Z and so on. If you “fail” at X, you have found a dead-end towards achieving Y and Z and beyond, but you have not failed in an absolute way. 

Let me give a few examples from my own life that seemed “huge” at the time, but they were not the end in themselves. 

1. Break up with a girlfriend
2. Not getting a job (that I loved) after my PhD
3. Struggling to do well in my first job (at Facebook) in the beginning
4. Did not get into RIMC (a military school in India) after 7th or 8th grade
5. Did not get into any good school after 11th grade in Delhi

All of these failures sucked at the time. But looking back, they all were a means to achieving something more or different. For example, the goal of getting a teaching job after PhD was to be happy and secure in my job. It turned out that that failure was pivotal in helping me be happy and secure in what I do now (10 years later). 

The point is that the goals themselves were not the end. There is always something beyond they are trying to facilitate. 

Success is not as sweet

Another angle to failure is through success. We tend to crave more of what we don’t have / cannot get. How many times we achieve our success / goal that we thought will make us incredibly happy, only to realize it is far from the truth and it did not make us feel what we thought it would. 

The happiness or the feeling of contentment is short-lived. I remember this from my getting the President’s Gold Medal after my B. Tech (B. S. in Engineering) from IIT Kanpur. I had worked on that goal for well over 2 years, and I thought I would be on the top of the world if I could achieve it. I remember exactly for how long that feeling of exhilaration lasted: 2 days. And then I was stressing about my (future) life in graduate school. 

Multiple failures suck!

What really hurts about the failure is not the actual failure. That happens only once. But the repeated replay in our mind of what could have been, what we could have done differently (hindsight is 20/20), and how things could have been different (grass is greener on the other side). That repeated playback in our mind hurts us a lot more — it stings us every day, sometimes multiple times a day, even though the actual failure stung us only once! That is because we associate a certain meaning to failure: it is “bad”, and we wish things could have been “good”. 

Do you really want to hurt yourself more than how much failure is hurting you? 

Exercises

Here are a few exercises to do to reduce the pain of failure and immunize yourself against it. Take at least 5 minutes of undistracted time to sit in a quiet place and journal about the answer. If you don’t journal, it is just a fancy term of take a blank sheet of paper and write what comes to your mind. 

1. Association of the target (on which you failed) to the next level goal. Think about what is really the end goal? Why did you want to achieve this target? What dreams are shattered because of this failure? Was this the best way to achieve those dreams? Are there other good paths? Even better paths?
   
   Are the associations true? We might think that getting into an ivy league college would get us the best job. But is that really true? (Read David and Goliath if you believe it is true.) We think that getting that promotion will make our lives much better, but is that true? 
   
   
2. Gratitude for the failure. We are used to thinking about what is good about success and what is bad about the failure. Let us flip it. What is good about this failure? It does not have to be anything big. Just anything good about this failure would do.
   
   Here is an example: if you failed to get into a group you have been wanting to, a simple benefit of this is that you will have more time to yourself to work on other things (the time you would have spent in the group).
   
   Another example from my own life: I went through a 2-3 years period of depression during the early 2010s. At the time, I used to tell a good friend that something good will come out of this extremely painful experience, but I don’t know what it would be. I now believe that that was one of the best learning experiences in my life. During that time, I learned about human nature, its fragility, and compassion for people suffering. I could not have learned it deeply without having that experience. Now, my coaching practice benefits immensely from that experience. 
   
   
3. Future self exercise. Close your eyes and visualize yourself 5 years from now. How big does this failure seem? What is the significance of the failure that happened 5 years ago? Do you remember the failure? Do you remember failures that happened 5 years prior? 

It is not the panacea

Accepting failure is about accepting that what happened is just a point on the map. We don’t know what the whole territory is. We went to crave more of what we cannot get, and working with failure is about becoming aware of this psychological phenomenon. 

The perspectives we talked about here do not eliminate “failures” from your life, but it reduces the sting associated with them (or might even make them meaningful). That is the power of reframing. 

When you have immunity to certain diseases, it does not mean you don’t get the virus (or whatever causes that disease), but the virus does not have the power over you. Same with failure.