Fall down seven times, get up eight.—Japanese Proverb
You could have all the skills in life that should make you successful, but if you lack one important skill, perseverance, it will all be worthless, because at the first sign of trouble, you’ll give up—and we all will face some amount of trouble in our lives.
On the other hand, you could be severely undereducated about your profession and have horrible social skills and financial knowledge, but if you’re incredibly persistent, it’s my belief you’ll eventually find your way.
As a software developer, this trait will be especially important to you, because you’re likely to face a large number of difficulties in your life and career. Developing software is difficult—that’s likely one of the reasons you’re drawn to it. In this chapter, we’ll talk about the importance of persistence and why it’s critical to develop the ability to face failure with the unflinching face of determination.
Why are we so afraid of failure, anyway?
The fear of failure seems to be a built-in instinct for most people. We prefer to do what we’re good at. We avoid the things that show our incompetence or lack of skill. We seem to have this innate fear of failure.
I’ve even seen it in kids learning to read. I’ve seen a child who is learning to read, and she’s making great progress, but you can tell when she reads a word that she’s unsure of; she’ll say that word very softly. The words she knows she shouts out with confidence. Give her a challenging word or some other task that isn’t quite matched with her abilities, and, instead of trying, she has the inclination to give up, saying, “You read it, Mommy.”
This same phenomenon is magnified in most adults. Most people, when faced with a significant challenge or the immediate and likely prospect of failure, will F avoid that situation. This response makes sense when turning down the option to fight with a 300-pound gorilla of a guy at a nightclub who is likely to knock your block off, but it doesn’t make much sense when faced with the task of speaking on a stage or learning a new programming language—there’s no real harm that can come to you from failing in those cases.
If I had to guess why most people are so afraid of failure, I’d have to say that it’s probably based around the idea of protecting our fragile egos. Perhaps we’re afraid to fail because we take failure a bit too personally; we think that our failure in a particular area is a reflection of our own personal worth.
I think this fear of bruising our egos is also aided by the simple misunderstanding about the nature of failure. We tend to think, and to be taught, that failure is a bad thing. We don’t view failure in a positive light, but instead think of it as the end. The word failure itself implies a dead-end path, a final destination, not a temporary bump in the road to success. We picture in our heads an island where people who have failed are sent. They sit there on the beach hopelessly downtrodden with no hope of rescue; their lives are failures; they are failures.
Even though we know failure isn’t the end, we seem to feel like it is. We tend to take ourselves a bit too seriously and attach some pretty heavy stakes to messing up. Because we aren’t trained to view failure as the path to success—in many cases the only path—we avoid failure at any cost.
Failure isn’t defeat
Failure isn’t the same thing as defeat. Failure is temporary, defeat is permanent. Failure is something that happens to you—something that you can’t completely control. Defeat is something that you choose—a permanent acceptance of failure.
The first step in letting go of the fear of failure is to realize that failure isn’t the end—unless you choose to make it so. Life is difficult, you’ll get knocked down, but it’s up to you to decide whether or not you’re going to get back up again. It’s up to you to decide that most things worth having are worth fighting for. It’s up to you to realize the joy and enjoyment of an accomplishment that comes, in a great part, from the difficulty and struggle of achieving it.
Have you ever played a video game that was really difficult? Remember that rewarding feeling when you finally beat that final boss? You may have failed many times along the way, but how good did it feel to finally succeed? Contrast I this with that video game that was equally difficult, but you entered a cheat code to give you infinite lives or make you invincible. How fun was that? Was there any joy in that accomplishment?
Continuing on with the video game example, what would have happened if you threw down the controller in frustration the first time you died? Wasn’t it to some degree the knowledge that you did fail so many times but finally succeeded that made the whole experience enjoyable? If that is the case, why do you avoid and regard failure in life as if it’s a permanent state? You don’t expect to pick up a video game controller and beat a video game perfectly without ever falling in a pit or getting singed by a fireball, so why do you expect to go through life without experiencing failure?
Failure is the road to success
Instead of fearing failure, embrace it. Not only is failure not the same as defeat, but it’s also a necessary step on the path to success. Few worthwhile things that you’ll do or accomplish in life will be done without at least some small failure along the way.
The problem is that we learn to view failure in such a negative light. When you go to school and you get an F on an assignment, it isn’t viewed as progress. You aren’t taught to think that failure was a learning experience that would take you closer to your goal. Instead, you’re taught to see it as a wholly negative thing. Real life doesn’t work that way. I’m not saying you shouldn’t study for you exams and that you should strive to get Fs for the learning experience and character-building opportunities, but what I’m saying is that in real life failures are usually necessary milestones that take us closer and closer to eventual success.
In the real world, when you fail at something, you learn from that experience and hopefully grow. Our brains are trained to work this way. If you’ve ever tried to learn how to juggle, or play baseball, or any other physical activity that requires coordination, you know that you fail a lot before you succeed.
I remember when I was first learning to juggle. I’d throw three balls up in the air and all three of them would hit the ground—not a single one in my hand. I could have thrown my hands up and said “I can’t juggle,” but for some reason I was persistent. I knew that other people had learned to juggle and that I could also learn, so I kept at it. After hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dropped balls, I eventually stopped failing. My brain made minor corrections over time and was A learning from the repeated failures I was experiencing. I didn’t control this process. All I had to do was keep trying—and to not be afraid to start trying in the first place.
I’ve recently started saying “I either win or I learn.” I don’t even consider failure an option anymore. I have decided that in any given situation, I am only going to fail if I give up, but regardless of the outcome there are only two options. First, I could succeed—which is great, obviously. But, second—and perhaps even greater—I could get a learning opportunity. A chance to improve myself. I’m OK with either outcome, so in that sense, I cannot lose. . . I cannot fail.
Learn to embrace failure
Again, I’d have to say that if you take nothing else from this book, take the following advice: learn to embrace failure, to expect it, to accept it, and to be ready to face it head-on.
It isn’t enough to just lose your fear of failure, but you should also be seeking out failure. You need to put yourself in situations where you’re all but guaranteed to fail if you want to grow. We often stagnate because we stop doing things that are dangerous or challenging to us. We find a comfortable place in our lives, shut the doors to our cabin, batten down the hatches, and weather out the storm, never stepping back out into the rain.
Sometimes, though, you need to get a little wet. Sometimes you need to be willing to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation that will force you to grow. Sometimes you need to actively go out of your way to find those situations, knowing that the harder you steer your ship into failure, the stronger the wind of success will blow you in the opposite direction.
How do you embrace failure? How do you convince yourself to jump into that choppy sea? It starts with accepting failure as a part of life. You have to realize that you’re going to face a lot of failure in your life and that for the most part it’s unavoidable. You can’t do everything perfectly the first time. You’re going to make mistakes.
You also have to realize that it’s okay to fail. It’s okay to make mistakes. You can try to avoid them, but never at the cost of missing out on an opportunity just because you’re afraid of the ego-crushing blow of failure. Once you realize that failure is okay, that failure doesn’t define you but rather how you respond to failure does, you learn to stop fearing it so much.
Finally, I’d suggest overexposing yourself to it. Go and do things that make you uncomfortable. Go out there and purposely put yourself in difficult situations that will inevitably result in some kind of failure. But the key is to not give up—let your failures fuel you forward, onward to success. Experience enough failures and the fear of failure itself will lose its power over you.
Reference: Soft Skills - The Software Developer's Life Manual
You can read more about soft skills and body language at work in this article: "6 Awesome Tips to Improve your Body Language at Work"