The true and unbiased reality of failure

Are you genuinely trying to be successful or are you merely trying to avoid failure? Your answer to that question can shed light on the reality of the results you are engineering for yourself, personally and professionally.

I have been an active professional trader for nearly a decade now, and the highlight of what I do revolve around intuiting financial markets. At the beginning of my career, I had lost a lot of money in that endeavour, so much that I still quiver by the mere thought of it. Though painful, those experiences have allowed me to learn (and embrace) certain truths worth knowing about the true and unbiased reality of failure.

It is a fact that most people do everything they can to reach success by avoiding failure. I think this is a problem, not only for traders like myself but for all of us collectively as a culture. So what I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside this short-sighted perspective. Secondly, I will express why it is such a problem. And finally, I hope to convince you that it is possible to step outside of it – and if you do, it is the single greatest leap you can make towards, not only success in any field but also psychological well-being.

Why we are so keen on avoiding failure

The cause is rather insidious and goes to the core of the foundation of our society. Our current educational process came about not to really educate children but to develop good employees. The sole purpose was – and still is – to “create” highly skilled workers who are able to think and come up with new ideas, but they also have to be good employees and do what they are told. This is achieved through the educational process where we are taught to never question the teacher, and to learn everything we are taught in a rather systematic manner.

We are fed with facts, tested on those facts, and those of us who make the least amount of mistakes are considered to be the smartest ones. Those of us with the lowest scores are shamed and disparaged. Hence, the educational system spends no time teaching us that fai-lure is, actually, an essential part of the process of success. We aren’t taught how to learn from our mistakes and how to rebound from failure – yet this is critical to real learning. Unless you had exceptional teachers who were willing to break out of the mould, chances are that you weren’t learning those crucial life lessons needed in order to navigate real life.

Learning these lessons is part of life one might argue, and I agree with this proposition. But how can we learn if: Everyone around us is doing the same thing – trying to avoid painful experiences that come as a result of being wrong and failing? Everyone around us is striving for perfection, even when no such thing exists? Our parents couldn’t even teach those lessons to us, because they, themselves, didn’t learn them?

As we see, it’s a cause-and-effect relationship and society as a whole marginalizes us if we don’t live up to these same dysfunctional standards.

So early on, we learn to avoid painful experiences that come as a result of failing – and being wrong – by developing a dire passion for being right. This is less of a problem for the majority of the population who are fine being employees. But, for those of us who embark on a journey to becoming self-sufficient and self-directed traders, entrepreneurs and innovators, we start our journey completely unprepared for the harsh reality that awaits us.

Instead of flowing and adapting to uncertainty, we desperately try to create it even where it doesn’t – and cannot – exist! In our professional lives, our egos hang onto every business deal we find ourselves in, every investment we make, partnership we create... and as individuals, we hang onto our personal opinions and beliefs as if they are the absolute and unconditional truth there is – sadly, this affects the way we connect with others.

When some things inevitably don’t go our way, we feel defeated, angry, frustrated, despaired, because according to what we have learned to believe, getting something wrong means there is something wrong with us. Failure also means the end! So we naturally repudiate this alternative and we try harder to be right, to “s쳮d without failing”, and to make reality fit our box-shaped vision we have for it. We do that in order to feel whole, smart, responsible, virtuous, safe… but it’s a logical fallacy and a recipe for misery unless we learn to break out of it.

Inflexibility breeds mediocrity in business, relationships, and anywhere else, but acknowledging this fact allows us to play the game differently. We have to learn to let go of our need to be right in order to escape failure and instead take an accurate assessment of reality: success is not an event, it is a process composed of peaks and valleys. In other words, success and failure are intertwined!

Accepting this truth, not only on an intellectual level but also on a practical one, is the only way to change our experience of living to something that is truly fulfilling as a matter of subjective experience.

The following 3 steps are the buil- blocks for change:

Realize when you feel you want to be right.Focus on developing an awareness of your body and mind. Both will display a plethora of symptoms that you can inquire about when your beliefs, opinions, ideas or values are being challenged in any way. You will see more often than not that your stress is a result of the resistance you display when you are trying to avoid failure. Awareness will give you the benefit of choice (which you didn’t have before) to either keep buying into the same recurring pattern of behaviour or to pick an alternative route – which promises better psychological satisfaction.

Understand that it’s okay to fail and to be wrong (really it’s okay!).The environment that surrounds us doesn’t interpret the information it has to offer. Good, bad, right, wrong are subjective ideas and occur strictly in our minds. In other words, we are the ones putting context behind our experiences with our own sets of beliefs. And it is possible to change how we live each and every experience. We just have to shift our perspective on what wrong really means for us. Does it mean shame, anger, and other limiting states of the mind, or intrigue, impartiality, motivation, opportunity to learn? In any case, we create our own reality!

Become the scientist of your own life. Human advancement rests on the principles of scientific investigation. When a science experiment is conducted, a lot of results will show up: positive results, negative results, all of which are data points. That is how scientists view failures – as just data points. If you adopt a similar approach, every failure and success become mere data points. When we become the scientists of our own lives, we free our minds of the emotional stigma associated with failures and being wrong, and instead we let eagerness, curiosity and opportunity guide us on the path of success.

Conclusion. We need moments of surprise, reversal, and “wrongness” to spice up our lives. Without those ingredients, success is tasteless! And only insofar as we learn to detach ourselves from fixed acquired beliefs that are limiting in their nature, can we then find genuine fulfillment in anything that we do, more so in everything that we are. This also enlightens us on the fact that failure and success go hand in hand – and they were never separate to begin with. Both are, and have always been, contingent upon one another. This truth, seen from an open mind, can prove to be quite liberating because it allows us to cultivate a sense of ease in the midst of uncertainty, “wrongness”, failure… and this is the single greatest moral, intellectual, and creative leap one can make.