Failure is Not to Be Feared
Failure is something that we often try to avoid at all costs because it feels horrible to fail at something. But failure is not to be feared. Rather, it should be embraced as an opportunity to grow.
I have failed so many times in my personal and professional life. I mean, hundreds of times. I would almost consider myself a chronic failure.
In high school, I played golf competitively. I was pretty good for my level of golf competition and would regularly shoot in the low 80s during competition. This is not good enough to play competitively at the next level but that’s okay.
However, this year I made the decision to get back into competitive golf after a 15-year hiatus from it. I took a couple of lessons in June and worked tirelessly to get better for weeks. I finally got the courage to actually enter a tournament, the MGA Mid-Am at the end of August, which is a three-day, 54-hole event with a cut down to the top 60 players after 36 holes.
After playing in competitions, I had a decent idea of what to expect when I got there. But nothing, and I mean nothing, can prepare you for tournament golf. You need to experience it firsthand to truly understand. Even the great Ben Hogan wrote in his book “Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf”:
Tournament golf and golf are as foreign to each other as ice hockey and tennis.
Regardless of all the nerves and anxiety I had building inside of me, I made a commitment to myself to play competitively and I was not backing out of this tournament. When I got to the first tee I was as excited and nervous as could be. But everything would be fine, I told myself.
I got off to a great start by making 3 pars in a row. However, everything fell off the rails soon after. I mean completely off the freaking rails. I posted a 9 on a single hole.
After 36 holes, I missed the cut by 19 strokes. In fact, I finished 11 spots from dead last in the entire tournament.
Complete and utter failure.
Or was it?
Failure is an Opportunity to Learn
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
Henry Ford
Failure is something all of us have been doing since the moment we were born into this world. No one was born as great and successful as they are now. Consider all of the people at the top of their professions from athletes to actors to CEOs, do you think they started there? Sure, some of them had a head start by coming from power or money, but for the most part, these people still had to work.
Ask yourself this.
Would you criticize a child for trying to walk, only to fall on their butt? Would you consider them a failure because they couldn’t walk immediately?
No, of course not. So stop criticizing yourself and others for being failures because they failed. Failing is a part of life.
It was after that terrible performance that I knew if I wanted to get better during tournaments, I needed to play in more tournaments. A few things I learned:
Do not put pressure on yourself to perform
Your golf game is what is. Don’t try to fix it on the course
Practice how you play in tournaments
Every single failure on the course, or in life, is an opportunity to learn and grow. If you are not failing, you are not pushing yourself beyond your current capabilities. You need to learn how to have a growth mindset and embrace every failure that comes your way.
Growth or Fixed Mindset
I have been joking around with my coworkers for years. I like to phrase it this way: “I have never made a mistake, but man, I have had an awful lot of learning opportunities.” Phrasing your mistakes and failures in this fashion helps you to reorganize what failure means to you.
Is failure something horrible that must be avoided at all costs? Or do you accept failure as part of your growth?
In her book Mindset, Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. discusses two mindsets — the growth and the fixed mindset. Essentially, people with a growth mindset find the idea of failure as a challenge or reason to learn, while people with a fixed mindset relate failure to stupidity or incompetence.
That begs the question, Does failure suck or does our view of failure suck?
Many people, including myself, fear failure so much that we refuse to even try. We are positive that we cannot be successful at, whatever it might be, or that other people are just naturally better that we refuse to put forward the effort.
Why are we afraid to put in the effort?
“There are two reasons.” Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. explains, “One is that in the fixed mindset, great geniuses are not supposed to need it . . . The second is that . . . It robs you of all your excuses.”
Aha! There it is. If we put forward 100% of our effort and still fail we have no excuse, no way to explain why we weren’t good enough. But guess what, that’s ok. It’s okay to not be good enough today or tomorrow as long as we continue to try.
Embrace Failure
I know it may sound cliche, but we must embrace all of our failures, every single one of them. If you have never failed, you have never tried to become better at something — you have played it safe. You must challenge yourself day in and day out.
One proverb I am sure all of us have come across at some point in our lives resonates with me.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
W. E. Hickson
This is as true in life as it is on the golf course. You will never truly get better at golf if you never
push yourself beyond your perceived limits. You may never get better if you do not practice in a way that causes you to get worse in the short term but better in the long term.
Now, ask yourself, which do you want to be — the person who sees failure as a reason to quit or the person who sees failure as an opportunity to learn and grow?