Failure is an Option by Terry Robson

Author:Terry Robson [Robson, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7304-9607-6
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2010-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

11

So tough

How resilience, persistence and flexibility help deal with failure

Is there any more quoted saying than Nietzsche’s aphorism, ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’?12 It may well be the piece of popcorn philosophy most widely uttered in the last two decades. Sports people use it after defeat, business people use it after an unsuccessful attempt at expansion, politicians use it to make sense of a stinging poll result, writers use it to cope with the forty-second rejection slip and we all use it as a salve to diffuse the sting of personal failure. What is it that we are really saying though?

Is it that provided failure does not actually kill us, then the learning that accrues will make us better people? Are ‘better’ and ‘learning’ encapsulated in that word ‘strong’? If so then this is a useful phrase. It may be though, that this is not the way that the phrase is always used. Often there is a sense that rather than being improved, the person speaking will in the future be more ‘protected’. It is as if having been wounded, but surviving the wound, the speaker of this phrase is saying, ‘I’ve healed in that space stronger than before so no-one will ever hurt me there again.’ In this case strength is being equated with toughening and protection and it is a far cry from the growth and learning of the other interpretation of the phrase.

This semantic juggling act is actually an important part of how you deal with failure. Are you resilient, tough or flexible? Do you deal with failure by learning and trying again, or do you build a fence around where you failed and vow never to go there again? When failure occurs do you respond to it in context using your learned personal qualities or do you throw up the shields that you forged in the fires of previous failure? The differences within these responses are the differences between being resilient, tough or flexible. These are not just different words for the same quality. They are quite different and they have very different outcomes. If you foster resilience in yourself you will cope with failure far better than if you cultivate toughness. To explore this further I am going to delve into an unexpected source.

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