Failing Upwards

You will fail. There isn’t any way around it. At some point in your life you will experience failure. In summary from Mick Herron reviewing Joe Moran’s If You Should Fail, “If all our actions feed into the eternal symphony of life on earth, then ‘Failure is the price we pay for our place in the orchestra’”. Some of us let failure fuel us, and other’s let it demoralize them from trying at all. In today’s society we are all too focused on what other people want, and we let that define our own meanings of failure. In actuality failure is personal. It’s a tool meant to define your own life and your own success, and with this knowledge I’m going to give to you, it will springboard you to hopefully living a happier life. In short, I’m going to show you how to win the game of life. Like any tool, failure is completely useless unless you know how to use it. You can’t build a house if you don’t know how to use a hammer.

You could read a million self help books, but the truth is, that isn’t going to do shit for you. I’m sorry, you’ve wasted all that time and money for nothing. Failure is less about the pandering speeches of Rocky, and more about psychology than you might realize. To start with we have to define some terms. From a dictionary definition, failure is “the omission of expected or required action, or lack of success”(“Failure”, Merriam-Webster). Failure can be correlated to an unexpected outcome related to goals set within our own goal hierarchies. A goal hierarchy contains both higher-order end goals, as well as lower order subgoals (Devezer, 2014). Higher order end goals are the big picture sort of things; Winning the Olympics, getting promoted, or anything that you can’t immediately do in the time being. Lower order subgoals are anything we do to get to those higher-order end goals. Now that could be training, working extra hours at the office, eating better, doesn’t matter. What matters is that these are interconnected.

What I mean by that is this, according to the Goals System Theory, the outcome of subgoals affects our commitment and behavior related to our end goals, and vice versa (Devezer, 2014). This isn’t over time, even a single one time failure of a subgoal can affect your commitment to your end goals. With multiple subgoal failures, even things that seem negligible can ultimately mean a total shift in our end goal commitment. No commitment means bad habits form, and success happens less and less. However there are loopholes. Goal importance works adjacent to this demoralization effect that happens when we fail. Have you ever been told by a coach to visualize doing something, and then you do it? Maybe it was hitting a home run, or completing a really hard floor routine in gymnastics. Whatever it was, visualization psychologically helped you towards that goal.

According to the Construal Level Theory, if we can easily visualize an end goal, or make it concrete, then we emotionally respond to that as a subgoal, as opposed to an end goal (Devezer, 2014). That end goal we concretely visualize starts to seem more like a stepping stone, so the emotional response to failure is less extreme. However, abstract end goals, or hard to visualize end goals, illicites a higher emotional response than concrete end goals (Devezer, 2014). To summarize, if we are able to visualize our end goals concretely, the emotional stakes feel lower, therefore making them affect our overall commitment less, allowing us to psychologically execute them easier. Additionally tasks that inform our self definition are inversely affected by failure when in regards to demotivation. In a quote from Robert Wicklund and Peter Gollwitzer, “The Theory of Symbolic Self Completion suggests that experiencing a goal failure for a behavior that defines one’s self concept propels people toward activities that renew their sense of completeness”(Wicklund and Gollwitzer, 1982). So in essence if we fail after attempting to complete a sub/end goal that informs our self identity, we are not negatively affected greatly, and we are motivated to carry out subsequent tasks related to our identity with vigor and energy. So the real way of not being affected by failure too heavily from a psychological perspective is to; be mindful of the little things, and focus on what you are passionate about. Seems easy enough right? Though, what the hell am I passionate about?

I alluded to this in my article titled The Pitfalls of The American Education System. The TLDR is this: The American Education system post 2001, is set up in a way to allow knowledge perception to be tested in a measurable way. This allows for yearly testing to show progress towards objective learning goals. This is incredibly effective for logical problem solving fields just as Math, Science, and Law, however when it comes to things more creative like Art it becomes a detriment to young learners. The system put in place does not allow for the input of the learner, and is only set up to allow what is basically intellectual reverb; the teacher shows you something and months later you say the same thing back, and it gets a score based on your accuracy. Students aren’t in positions regularly to add abstract thoughts to the processes they are exposed to. They aren’t allowed to deconstruct, mash things together in different ways, take ideas from other places and add their own flair. If you take apart a motor and put it back together differently that’s wrong, but if you do the same with a painting, it’s just a different painting. That’s the issue.

At the moment, we see anything that is not expected as a failure, and when it comes to things like Math tests sure that makes sense, but life is like art, just because it’s not what you expected doesn’t make it wrong. However, we are set up from the beginning by the public education system to think that our own abstract inputs lead to incorrect results. We are only part of that system for a few years. We can’t let the expectations of a system, that only covers 10 years of our lives, determine our motivations and goal importance for our whole existence. Once we learn to let go, we begin to see our own work as important, regardless of an irrelevant system, because school is only part of your life. We need to change our perception of what is important, and give it our own meaning, and that can start prior to graduation.

How does one change that? How do you determine your own importance, when you’ve always been told what you need and what you want? It can be difficult to win a game that for the most part is constructed in our minds, so when looking for a solution, we can apply Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Razor is a scientific and philosophical rule that states; of two competing theories, the simplest often provides truth over the complex. So, how do you win the game? Rather than work extra hard at pushing success forcefully while having doubts, or trying to cheat the system, my theory is just don’t play. It’s an oversimplification but let me break it down a little bit for you.

By “Refusing to play” what I mean is this: You need to rewire your brain so that your goal importance is no longer determined by external influences. Typically I’ve observed once you graduate from school, the influencers of your goal importance shifts from that of your teachers, to your boss, social pressures, advertising, etc. Unless you learn to ignore those incoming signals, you will always have someone or something telling you what you need and what is important to you. It’s the genius of marketing in a consumer driven economy; Convincing someone that they need something, and that they came to that conclusion all on their own. Apparently we’re told we need to live like royalty to even consider ourselves to be successful or worthy of happiness, which is just backwards. Living in excess might be what the Kardashians need to feel whole and successful, but just because they desire to live that way doesn’t mean you have to as well. When I say stop playing the game, that means you have to stop listening to the external motivations that are determining your goals and goal importance.

From a mental standpoint when you make the decision to “stop playing”, initially, you are greeted by a big bright flashing sign that says, “CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE FAILED, YOU WILL NEVER BE ANYTHING! GET BACK IN LINE AND TRY AGAIN”. Don’t be alarmed, that’s normal. Just keep moving past it. This next part may be easy, it might be hard, but you need to cleanse your pallet. What does that mean? It means I want you to do nothing. Take a week or two, and just focus on yourself. If that means taking time away from your normal schedule, do it. Remove yourself from as many of the external influences in your life as you possibly can while remaining financially stable and mentally capable. That means no social media, no group chats, no memes, no online shopping, no TV, or anything like that. Honestly, just staying off of the internet in its entirety is a pretty good place to start. If someone needs to get a hold of you, a phone call or a few texts is alright, but try to stay away from anything beyond absolutely necessary. If you still have to work to keep the lights on, do what you gotta do, nothing wrong with that.

You might feel anxious and have some FOMO in the beginning, like the world is going on without you, or your friends will forget you exist. That’s expected, this is a detox, and it’s important you treat those feelings of FOMO or anxiousness like you would withdrawal. Cutting out harmful or unnecessary influences from your life is a lot like quitting sugar or cigarettes. The hardest part about stopping is not starting again. I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you end up coming out of this detox and some of the people or things you once liked are no longer there, or no longer seem appealing, those probably weren’t things you actually liked. You were just told you liked them by someone or something. It’s a hard truth and it might sting a little bit, but you have to realize that sometimes becoming something different means reevaluating the things you once had. It’s okay though, the empty spots in your life where those people or things were, we’re gonna fill them with new things that YOU like.

Since you’ve detoxed, I’m guessing you have a lot of free time now, which is great. This means you can take time to explore and find things that excite you and make you happy. The way I want you to go about this is simple. Say yes. Someone asks you if you want to go to a new bar, say yes. That park you’ve driven past a million times but have never set foot in, explore it. Have you always wanted to hike the Hollywood Sign, but it’s so touristy and it feels silly as someone who lives in Los Angeles? Go do that hike and take the most touristy photo you possibly can. The purpose of this exercise is to forget about external influences in their entirety, and focus on the things YOU want to do. This is borrowing a concept used by artists called Divergent thinking:

“A key part of [Divergent Thinking] is to refrain from self-editing out of concerns that an idea may be impractical, unoriginal, or stupid. The more one free associates and makes connections to other ideas, borrows (or steals) from other fields, and challenges the assumptions about the original problem, the better. A divergent-thinking session by an individual or group will often generate dozens, or even hundreds of potential directions to explore. The act of generating these options and allowing them to interact with each other exponentially increases both the number and quality of potential solutions. Sometimes immediately usable results will emerge directly from this process, but more often this process works by triggering new ways of thinking, ideas that were not apparent at the outset, and possibilities that can be built upon and further developed. Such a process can be very effective in destroying established patterns of thought and creating channels of opportunity through radical openness to suggestion, suppression of judgment and ego, and the challenging of a problem’s assumptions and boundaries. The energy generated by this method can also be highly infectious, carrying participants along in generating and executing ideas they might not usually consider.” (Steinbach, p. 12)

Divergent Thinking, within the framework of Steinbach’s work, is in reference to contemporary models of problem solving within parameters of a given project. However, for our purposes, the problem we are trying to solve has much more general parameters than trying to build a bridge or design a modern home. The key take away I want you to achieve with your own Divergent thinking is the part about self-editing. The more we eliminate self-editing, the more we are driven by our own self concept for “Personally Autonomous Reasons” (Sheldon and Elliot, 1999). To give an example illustrated by Berna Devezer, “one consumer may recycle out of genuine concern for the environment, whereas another may do so merely to be viewed favorably by his neighbors. The former consumer pursues such goals for what Sheldon and Elliot (1990) call “personally autonomous reasons” (PARs), which express a person’s enduring interests and values that elicit higher levels of motivation and effort (Gore and Cross 2006)” (Devezer, 2014).

In layman’s terms what they mean by that is if your goals are motivated internally rather than externally, you will receive higher levels of motivation and commitment to said goals. While motivation is a nice byproduct of utilizing PARs, it’s not our desired result. What our sole desire is, is to shift our motivation sources from external reasons, to personally autonomous reasons. For us, we should interpret PARs as living unabashedly. I love being an actor, but everytime someone used to ask me what I did, I used to say I was in advertising so I wouldn’t get bombarded with passive aggressive statements, or judgmental questions. I felt the need to self edit my goals and identity so as to not alienate myself from the people around me. When I decided to not let my fear of humiliation or alienation get in the way of my identity and goals, I not only felt more confident about myself, but I didn’t care what those people thought. Their opinions no longer mattered when it came to my goals, or my identity

Now that you have found something that makes you feel whole and energizes you, it’s time to find people who do the same. When growing up we are thrown together with all sorts of people, and although our interests and goals might align in childhood those can greatly differ as we mature. As stated earlier, we might feel the need to self-edit so as to please those around us, but the people who reinforce that way of thinking aren’t the kind you want in your life. To find people who have a positive influence on your life and don’t make you feel the need to self-edit, my best advice is to find those people around the things you are passionate about.

Most likely you will happen upon a few people along the way who share the same passions or similar goals as you. For me, I’ve found my friends not only in the theater, but in short film productions and at local events I’ve attended. Since I’m on a ground level for a lot of these things, many of the people I meet are interested in similar things as I am because it’s their passion. I don’t feel the need to self-edit my goals or identity because they are things the people around me are also passionate about. Once you find these people, hold onto them. Between your new found goals, empowered self concept, and the friends you made along the way, your life is about to change for the better. It’s crazy to think that this all started by allowing yourself to “fail” by “not playing the game”.

It’s difficult to say exactly what failure means from a general standpoint, because it’s personal. Society might have one definition for it that strays far from the dictionary, but it doesn’t have to guide your journey. For me, I consider failure to be the same as success, because although I might have not gotten something I was expecting, that just means I have the opportunity to explore something new. If there is a fork in the road, and one path is success and the other is failure, I don’t see failure as a dead end. To me, I just see a fork leading to two more forks, and then four forks beyond those two. Life isn’t a Math Equation. You can’t just erase everything and start over because you got something you weren’t expecting. You have to take the time to look at what you have, and see if you can do anything with it. Employ Divergent Thinking, find something you didn’t see before, say f*** the haters, and do whatever it is that makes you happy. It takes a strong person to put themselves out there and not care what others think, but anyone can change what failure means to them. It all starts with listening to what your heart is telling you, and to say yes.

WORK CITED

Gore, Jonathan S. and Susan E. Cross (2006), “Pursuing Goals for Us: Relationally Autonomous Reasons in Long-Term Goal Pursuit,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90 (5), 858–61.

Keating, Christopher. “The Pitfalls of The American Education System.” Medium, Medium, 25 July 2021, cdkeatin.medium.com/the-pitfalls-of-the-american-education-system-71041520c060.

Sheldon, Kennon M. and Andrew J. Elliot (1999), “Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76 (3), 482–97.

Wicklund, Robert A. and Peter M. Gollwitzer (1982), Symbolic Self-Completion. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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