Failure is relative and here's how to deal with that.
My friend Ed created a training session on dealing with failure for a training course at 64 Million Artists, who we both work with. There was a lot to take away from Ed's session, but the insight that stayed with me was this: that failure is relative. Ed defined it as something like 'When our expectations of what will happen don't match with reality'.
Ed used to be a secondary school teacher, and so knows all too well a great example to make this point: two students on results day, both with identical grades, but with one dancing around the room in celebration and the other in pieces in disappointment.
Even with a standardised test, our experience of 'failure' is relative.
This, of course, is why our definition of success matters. The psychologist and author Robert Holden says that our definition of success influences every important decision in our lives. Spending time with that definition, being really clear on it, is therefore an incredibly powerful practice. As I shared on a recent podcast episode with Jean Balfour, I spent most of last year spending five minutes each day journaling on the question, 'What is success today?' The results were transformational for my experience of life, and the reason for that is for exactly the reason that Ed gave. Through this inquiry into what success is for me, my criteria for success became gradually clearer and more nourishing. In Robert's language: I got to the follow up question to 'What is success?': 'What is real success?' With the emphasis on real.
And so instead of judging myself a failure on criteria that didn't really matter to me, that I had inherited or adopted without thinking, I thought about what really did matter, and created definitions for the soul. This allowed me to live into those definitions more each and every day. And it allowed me to know, on a deep level, what the definition of success (and therefore failure) was.
But holding to those nourishing definitions, definitions of possibility, is hard. It's particularly hard when the world mostly doesn't feel like it operates like that and, often, neither do I.
A couple of weeks ago when I asked somewhat what made him want to speak with me he said 'Well, I looked up some coaches and I saw you had an interesting book and 4,000 followers on LinkedIn.' And I thought, 'Wow, do I?' that's quite a lot. A definition of success and failure there - around my LinkedIn followers - where I felt like a success: an impressive number to that guy = success.
And then, of course, over the next few days I came across three of my contacts who, when I was on their LinkedIn pages, I saw they had TENS OF THOUSANDS OF FOLLOWERS. Honestly I didn't even really know that was a thing on LinkedIn unless you're Adam Grant or Brené Brown.
And what happened? My experience of my 4,000 followers (I love you all, please don't leave me) changed. Suddently, instead of it feeling like a success, it felt like a puny, pathetic failure. The number hadn't changed (in fact, in the intervening time, it had gone up a little) but my experience of it felt completely different. Suddenly, success was: the 10,000-25,000 that those guys have.
What is interesting about this is that I know that this is what the internet age is like. I've written about it before. For most of human existence it was possible to be the leading something in your network. The best blacksmith, the best cooker of broths, the most experienced midwife. Now, the internet shows us - only always, if we look - someone, somewhere doing our thing but a bit better (sometimes a lot better).
The only option in the age of the internet is to remember the falseness of the internet and to remember who you are. To remember that underneath, no one can compete with you at being you. That there are things about you - and here's some help if you want to think about what those things might be - that other people will find intimidating. If you want to build a brand that will endure, as Nicole Brigandi and I explained in this talk, build it on what makes you unique.
And, then, to comparison. Several times this week - with the LinkedIn followers, in the gym, on a podcast I was a guest on - I have found myself needing to return to one of Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules For Life. Probably the most powerful reframe on comparison that I have ever read: compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
The first 12-Minute Method Book - How to Start When You're Stuck - is out now!