Is Failure the Price we Pay for Future Success?

I watch a lot of stand-up comedy and I watch a lot of interviews of stand-up comedians. In many ways, I see them as sorts of pop philosophers and I believe that one can find a great deal of truth in their words, if he or she is willing to look for it. Often, when they are being questioned or speaking about their own experiences in the industry, they will talk about the difficulty that they had when they started working as a comedian. Almost universally, they will say that they spent years failing before they found their voices and with them, success. They are not alone in their struggles either. Most things and especially creative ones, require a lot of practice before they can be done well and practice always demands failure. We seem to recognize this in a lot of cases. When we learn to play a game or sport, we expect to be out classed by those who have been doing it for years because that is the natural order of things. Interestingly, however, when we begin to feel as though we are entitled to our success, we seem to blind ourselves to this truth. We tell ourselves that we deserve things that we may not have earned. We may allow ourselves to be mislead or even exploited by others who will say that they know an "easier way." When we naturally fail as we are bound to do, we become frustrated and demoralized which often leads us to give up when it is not necessary to do so. In short, if one hopes to find success, he or she must rid the self of entitlement and the expectation of instant gratification and learn to embrace his or her many unavoidable failures that he or she will, doubtlessly, suffer.

This is not to say that it is impossible to suddenly become successful at a thing. On rare occasions, an individual has enough raw natural talent to counteract his or her lack of experience but this is not the norm. In some cases, people are very lucky and stumble into success and make the best of it once they have it. Sadly, the rest of us will have to spend some time grinding away at whatever it is that we want to do. This is not the easy answer many people might want to hear but it is, I believe, the truth.

Speaking of easy answers, it is important to be wary of anyone who offers us quick or unearned success because they are often lying or exaggerating and it is usually done for their own gain. I am reminded of a proposal that was offered to a friend of mine when she was 17 years old. A 30(ish) year old man, with whom she worked, told her that he was well connected and could get her a prestigious and well paying job, despite the fact that he, himself, worked for the same low wage that she did. All she had to do, he said, was (let's say) satisfy some of his needs. She had accepted this offer as reality without question because she wanted it to be true and because she believed that she deserved the prosperity that he was offering. She very nearly went through with it too but, luckily, I and a few others made a strong case against it and she saw that everything was not as it seemed. Not shockingly, it later came to light that the guy had been feeding the same line of bullshit to every attractive girl who would listen to him. The point is, most people will not just hand you success without you having done something to deserve it but some may offer "success" in the hopes of gaining something for themselves.

Sometimes, we blind ourselves the necessity of effort and failure. We all like to think of ourselves as good and talented people and we like to believe that we deserve good things. While this may be the case, it does not mean that we will get those good things over night or that our talent needs no refinement. We have to work at the things we want to achieve, we have to fail along way, and we have to learn from that failure. Going back to the example of the comedians, most will say something like "I sucked for five years" or "I bombed every night until I didn't." If they had felt that they were entitled to success, they would have quit the first time they crashed and burned as many, potentially brilliant, others had before. The same principal is true in most situations. Talented writers have written more bad stories than good ones (though you may have never see them). Successful artists all spent plenty of time making bad art (which they probably destroyed out of shame). I could go on but I think you see the pattern. We all are destined to screw things up every once and a while.

The reality is that most things of value require some effort on our part and putting forth that effort almost always involves a little failure. When things are easy, we don't call doing them "making an effort" and we rarely fail to do them well. Bombing is painful for a comedian. Writing something that no one wants to read is hard for an author. Having our dreams begin to cave in around us is upsetting to us all but there are lessons to be learned in losing and those lessons are what teach us how to be successful when we try again. We can take a look at our failed post and try to determine why nobody upvoted it. The comedian can find the joke that turned the audience against them and "punch it up" to make it funnier. In the end, accepting failure, drives us to change our actions for the better and that change is often the womb from which real prosperity is born.

I usually try to stay away from these types of "inspirational" topics but I have been seeing a lot of gloom on this site lately. People here, who came expecting to be an instant hit, are getting discouraged and thinking about leaving and I don't want to see that happen because, I think, many of them can be successful with time, patience, and a willingness to fail. This issue goes beyond this place though. People give up on their dreams every day, not because the dreams were impossible (though they sometimes are) but because they couldn't handle the necessary failure that the dreams required. If we can cast off our entitlements and avoid the promises of quick success, we can more effectively work to complete tasks. Plus, we will suffer less when things do not go our way. This is no guarantee, of course, but it will give us a much better chance of getting to where we want to go than quitting or looking for easier paths ever would.

Peace.

All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website, unsplash.com.