Kirill: This is Five Minute Friday episode number 34: Failure.
So, failure. All of us have been there. All of us have gone through this very painful experience of not succeeding in our ambition, in not succeeding in a project, in not succeeding in something that we are doing, even in our personal lives. And it’s very painful, it can be devastating at times to look back at all your efforts and look back at all the things you did and sometimes understand why it didn’t work, sometimes not understand why it didn’t work, but nevertheless, that feeling that you have failed at, it’s not gone the way that you have planned, it’s horrible, right?
A lot of the time, we try to get away from it, we try to hide from it, or we try to push it very deep down so that it doesn’t bother us, or we try to distract ourselves. And why do we do that? Well most of the time we do it because we kind of see it as a reflection of ourselves, we don’t think that we just failed at this project, we think that we are a failure, that we’re not good enough, we weren’t good enough to succeed. But the reality of things is much brighter. It’s much, much better than that. It’s that failure is necessary. That a failure is a necessary step in learning. And only those people who play it very, very safe throughout their lives and don’t try new things, those are the people who never fail. And if you want to have a rich and fulfilling and interesting life, a few failures are going to be inevitable.
And that’s the best way of looking at it. And as Andy from Headspace would put it, paraphrasing him, think of it as the sky. You always have the blue sky above your head. Sometimes there are clouds that cover it, and it looks like a very miserable day. But the blue sky is still there. And the same thing about failure. That sometimes you might feel terrible or horrible because of something that happened, but in reality, you’re still that same person. You’re still that same great amazing human being, and you just need to get past this and learn from these mistakes.
And so my call would be to be open to failure. Be open to the fact that it will inevitably happen, and you just have to learn to get up and move on, whether it’s a project at work, you’re doing some data science and you’re doing some analytics and then something didn’t work out, the project failed, instead of just beating yourself up about it, you can learn from that and keep moving forward. And you’ve probably heard this thousands and millions of times, but nevertheless it’s still a good thing to remind yourself of these things. And I need to remind myself of these things sometimes. And a good quote that I just found, I really liked, is by Abraham Maslow.
Abraham Maslow is the person that created the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s about how you have physiological needs, and you have safety, you have love and belonging, you have esteem and self-actualisation, it’s like a pyramid. And those are the basic human needs. So his quote on this topic is “In any given moment, we have two options: to step forward into growth, or to step back into safety.” And this kind of like reflects the fact that you can step forward and be prepared to fail because if you want to grow, you have to be prepared to fail. And it will happen. Or you can step back into safety and live your whole life there.
Another great one is “A ship is safe at harbour, but that is not what a ship was built for.” So remember that failures are going to happen. Take them as a necessary and an indication of the fact that you’re learning and you’re growing, and just learn to get up quickly from a failure and fail forward. You fail, you get up, you proceed, and you pursue the next big thing, and every time you fail, you just learn from it and you keep moving forward and that’s how you will become ultra successful in whatever you’re doing.
And I hope you enjoyed today’s quick session. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
