The Importance of Failure

The story behind any success is littered with a trail of many try and try agains.

A few years ago we booked up our Croyde Easter Family Adventure. With the UK weather it could have been raining or snowing, but luckily it was full sun most days. Great for walks and reading on the beach, not good for surfers; the waves were dull and flat. We saw a lot of bored bobbing wetsuiters sitting on their boards watching and waiting for the next big wave.

We were happy to bodyboard, but my eldest daughter thought she would try skimboarding. You stand on the beach, wait for a wave to break, and as the water forms into a shallow wash, you throw the flat board in front of you, jump on it, and then skim across the surface. Sounds easier than surfing, but it still takes a lot of practice. The top picture (success?) was the only good shot I had out of 30. The rest (failure?) were all like this:

Painful and humiliating this might have been, yet it was the very road to her success. Failure would have been to have tried for half an hour, lost heart, quit, go get an ice cream.

Learning to skim, learning to play guitar – they both take practice and more importantly the right attitude to ‘failure’. Most students starting any skill want to be great within weeks. The reality is that this black and white thinking only hastens the discouragement.

All the little failures in mastering a skill are vitally important for the process of success to work. Getting to grips with this mentality will not only revolutionize the way someone looks at their progress on the guitar, but also in other areas of learning in life.

Make sure what you are deeming as ‘personal failure’ (i.e. not seeming to improve as quickly as you want) is not just those same old thought patterns rearing their ugly head trying to undermine your desire to succeed at something. We don’t have a choice of who our parents are and how they brought (or dragged) us up. They had their own challenges to deal with and what came out of their mouths sometimes may not have necessarily been that helpful for our self esteem.

As pre-teens we soak everything up believing what we’re told as if it were gospel truth. It’s only when we mature that we realise the futility of saying to a child anything that includes tag lines like; good for nothing/failure/story of your life/selfish/won’t succeed – often said in the heat of the moment but said enough times that it gets deeply embedded in our psyche. Years later as we try and make our own way and do our own thing those same messages sometimes come back to haunt us. That’s why having a defeatist attitude is so debilitating whatever new skill you’re trying to master.

The key is to realise where these lies are coming from; shine the torch, bring them out of the darkness and expose them for what they are. Stand up tall, let go of any defeatist/victim mentality, and tackle new challenges with a brave heart. Pick up that guitar and separate emotion from practice and remember when push comes to shove if you repeat something enough times you will master it.

Try… Try…

And then try again. Do something 10 times, 20 times, 50 times. And then look back and see if you have progressed. And if you’ve put in the time (even 10-15 focussed minutes daily, 4 or 5 times a week) then it’s not a question of if you’ve progressed, it’ll be how much you’ve progressed – go try it for yourself!