Failure is an Option: How setbacks breed success

By Terry Robson

Want to be a success? Then you'll need to embrace failure first. This inspiring book by ABC Local Radio's wellbeing expert gives you all the insights and tools you'll need to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and discover your true potential.
Everybody has experienced failure at some stage - and we will no doubt experience it again, perhaps many times. the question is: does failure get the credit it deserves? In this inspiring and practical book, terry Robson reveals how success cannot be achieved without a willingness to embrace failure - shows us the opportunity that failure presents us to reflect and reassess. He delves into the notion of failure from philosophical, psychological and spiritual perspectives, and provides the tools we need to not only cope with failure, but also to learn from it. the insights of life coaches, psychologists, a Buddhist nun, a Christian minister and even a Sufi counsellor are interspersed with interviews with people who have succeeded after failure - including billionaire entrepreneur Gerry Harvey, world champion surfer Layne Beachley, singer toni Childs and television personalities Antonia Kidman and Mikey Robbins. this book is an indispensible guide to picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and discovering your true potential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jan 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9780730496076

Terry Robson

TERRY ROBSON appears on national television and radio, including ABC 702, as well editing Wellbeing magazine and writing for a range of magazines and newspapers. He has a degree in psychology and is also a qualified naturopath. This is his fourth book.

Book preview

1

Nothing succeeds like failure

A brief history of failure’s role in success

We live in a failure-phobic society. We worship success and seek it at all costs. This has become enshrined in popular culture phrases like ‘Failure is not an option.’ In fact, however, failure is always an option and what is more, that is not a bad thing. Hence the title of this book because what we will seek to establish is that first of all failure is an option and secondly that it is a necessary part of life. Unfortunately, we are so desperate to avoid failure that we don’t really have learned strategies to deal with failure when it comes along and so the failure becomes a devastation because we don’t know how to deal with it. So an additional aim of this book will be to provide you with strategies for meeting and moving on from failure in the healthiest and most productive way possible.

To achieve this we have interviews with ten high-profile and successful people from areas including business, sport, film, novel writing, journalism, comedy, broadcasting, and the music industry. We will refer to these wonderful people as ‘personalities’ for want of a better word. What is the collective noun for a group of extraordinary people who willingly share with a public audience the reality of their dark and glorious times? A ‘truth’ of extraordinary people? In any event, accepting linguistic defeat for a moment, the chapters on these well-known people will show that successful individuals, like everyone else, do experience failure, and will delve into how successful people greet that inevitable companion failure when it travels beside them for a while.

In addition we will have more chapters that look at how you can deal with failure when it arrives in your life. For these chapters I have interviewed leading people coming from psychological and spiritual perspectives to give you as broad a view as possible as to what is right for you. These ‘life experts’ include a Buddhist nun, a Christian minister, a Sufi psychologist, a yoga practitioner, a lecturer in psychology and two life and business coaches. In arriving at this diverse group I wanted to have input from people who had dealt with, thought about, meditated on, or prayed about the topics that I would be addressing. I wanted the process of finding them to be somewhat organic without simply sitting back and twiddling my thumbs waiting for the right people to appear. I had an idea of some people that I would definitely approach and also had a few ‘areas’ of thought and belief from which I hoped to find people who could contribute.

In many ways I followed that oft-quoted dictum from the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams: ‘Build it and they will come.’ I like this because it suggests that you do magnetise things to you in life but that the ‘magnetising’ process is not just wishing: you must actively create (or ‘build’) something that will draw the people and things that you need. In this case I was building the book through research and interviews and gradually the appropriate people came along. In the end all of the ‘experts’ consulted here were eager and passionate about the subject. They have provided valuable, disparate and frequently overlapping points of view. Having woven all of these elements together what you have in this book is a powerful tool that yes, is a guide to dealing with failure, but is also a pretty handy tool in helping you to learn to live fully and joyously.

View from above

Failure is a not very useful word or concept to describe things that happen to us. It really means things not working out as we had planned. The news is this is going to happen to everyone. The problem is all of the negative connotations that we hang on failure which prohibit you from engaging with it enough so that you can deal with it when it occurs.

What we term failure is really just a part of the process of being alive yet we have such a perjorative idea of it. The negative results that stem from labelling something a failure include self-doubt, self-loathing, mistrust of others, blame of others, mistrust in the world, an outlook of pessimism, lack of belief in the goodness of life — the list could go on. All of these gremlins of thought inhabit your midnight musing and do not contribute to a satisfying and productive life. The most tragic aspect of this is that lives are undermined either by failure or by trying to avoid it when failure is in fact, a kind friend.

What we look at as failure is really just a component of life and therefore of success and of everything else. To encourage our minds to inhabit this new space as regards failure, let’s take ourselves high above the timeline of humanity and see how failure played a role in one of the great military successes of history, one of the most influential films ever made, and, believe it or not, in bridge building.

Henry V and Agincourt

The battle at Agincourt in 1415 between the English army under Henry V and the French forces has become synonymous with success against the odds from an English point of view. Although there is dispute amongst historians as to exact numbers, it seems reasonable that approximately 6000 English faced off against approximately 30,000 French on 25 October 1415 at Agincourt. Albeit that the English had the usual advantage afforded them via their longbows and the men who used them, it is generally agreed that the French superiority of numbers should have been enough to nullify even that often devastating weapon. The English won a famous victory largely due to muddy fields and poor French tactics. The French charges became bogged in the extremely sodden fields of Agincourt on that day. In addition, their lack of battlefield coordination left them unable to make full use of their numerical superiority. It was a political victory for Henry more than anything else and plunged France into decades of political turmoil. Yet almost 600 years later Agincourt remains a symbol of success to the English. This is largely due to the wild disparity in numbers of the engaging forces and also to the kick along Shakespeare gave it almost two centuries later when he put on Henry’s lips the famous, ‘We few, we happy few’ speech in his play Henry V. So Agincourt retains the lustre of success centuries after it occurred but what is not so widely known is that it was immediately preceded by a military failure.

Henry’s first objective when he arrived in France with his army was to capture the port city of Harfleur. The people and garrison of Harfleur settled in behind their walls and Henry was forced to lay siege. In the course of the protracted siege Henry’s army was savaged by illness and although Harfleur was eventually won, Henry had lost half his army on what was intended to be an easy beginning to the French campaign. So great were the English losses at Harfleur that many of Henry’s advisors wanted him to go home. That would have been humiliating to Henry, who had spent a fortune on this French sortie. Against all advice — which was to accept the failure at Harfleur and return home — Henry decided to march what was left of his army through France to Calais before returning to England. This was probably a show of bravado more than anything. After the failure of Harfleur Henry needed to regain some respect by showing that he could march through France untouched. Henry did not want a battle. His army was depleted and tired. He was forced to make a detour on his way to Calais in order to avoid a band of French troops and this brought him to the major French force at Agincourt. The rest is history: the English prevailed and the French were demoralised. Yet Agincourt would never have happened in the way it did had Henry not failed so miserably in his siege of Harfleur. One of the great emblematic military successes only occurred because of a failure.

A film you may know

See if you can identify the film that I am describing before you look forward to the answer. What I will tell you is that you almost certainly know the film and it looked very much like being a failure. The actors who took part in this film were returning to the United States from the overseas shoot expressing real concerns about the project. The studio began to get very worried about cost blow-outs and cut funding. The director was forced to finish filming with three sound stages on the go at once. He was cycling between the sound stages and getting very little sleep and the worry and physical demands took a toll on his health. Then back in the United States when the director saw some of the preliminary edits he realised they were so terrible that he knew he had to start from scratch and this added at least three months to the planned Christmas release date. In the studio concerns were growing that the US$11 million they had spent would never be recouped. The market research was telling them that the title of the film would not work well but the director would not change the name. By the time there had been a directors’ screening there were real concerns. Of the fourteen directors who viewed the film three thought it was brilliant, three were on the fence, and eight thought it was an absolute disaster. The studio felt that their huge investment was about to go up in smoke.

The film that cost US$11 million to make ended up making US$797 million dollars worldwide. The lemon that the studio had on their hands became the highest grossing film of all time at that stage. The film was Star Wars and George Lucas’ seminal film spawned five further films with the six combined grossing US$4.3 billion at the time of writing. Not a bad return and not bad for a film that failed many times in its progress.

It failed to inspire the actors, and who could blame them since they spent all of their time acting against a blue screen and they really had no idea what the film was about. It failed to impress studio executives and it failed to impress fellow directors, and it went over budget and over time.2 There were lots of failures in the production of Star Wars but George Lucas stayed true to his vision and with the support of a few far-sighted people, such as Alan Ladd Jr, the film was made and went on to achieve unimaginable success. No wonder it was initially perceived as a failure; nothing like it had ever been done before. How could traditional measures of success and failure be applied to such a new thing? Of course, they could not and this is what genuinely new ventures always encounter: accusations of failure when measured by the old standards. Star Wars is an example to anyone with a vision that when you try something new, the people who are doing something old will nearly always call you a failure.

Building bridges

Bridge building may not seem the kind of area in which failure is allowed, yet this is precisely where failure is of great assistance. In fact there is a book, Success through failure: The paradox of design by Henry Petroski,¹ which spells this out in minute detail. Petroski stresses that there is no more certain road to eventual failure than modelling designs solely on past successes. He says that basing any design, whether of a product, public work, or business procedure, on models already proven to be successful would seem the way to go. He makes the point though that what makes things work is often hard to articulate and the successful elements are even harder to extract from the whole. ‘Things work,’ he says, ‘because they work in a particular configuration, at a particular scale, and in a particular context and culture.’ He illustrates this with the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the third largest suspension bridge in the world. Petroski says that the design of this bridge was based on a series of other successful suspension bridges but what happened was that as each new bridge was designed eventually the very cables that had been included in the design to prevent failure were left out in the interests of economy and aesthetics.

Petroski’s theory was supported by Professor Mark Dodgson, Director of the Technology and Innovation Management Centre at the University of Queensland, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National program Ockham’s Razor. Dodgson observed, ‘Recent visitors to London will I hope, have taken the opportunity to walk across the Millennium Bridge, linking the Tate Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral, the first footbridge to be built across the River Thames for more than 100 years. It is an extraordinary engineering, architectural and sculptural achievement, a design of such beauty it is described as a blade of light across the river. The bridge opened on 10 June 2000, when between 80,000 and 100,000 people walked across it. When large groups of people were crossing however, it started wobbling alarmingly and quickly gained notoriety as the wobbly bridge. It was closed after two days, causing immense embarrassment to all concerned. After an intensive international effort the cause was found and rectified. The problem apparently, was the way men tend to walk with splayed feet, like ducks. When many walk in unison, unusual lateral excitation occurs. Had it been a women-only bridge, there would have been no problem. As a result of this debacle, new knowledge about bridge design was developed, and future projects will allow large numbers of men to waddle happily together over rivers.’²

So whether it is in bridge building, filmmaking or military endeavour, it seems nothing succeeds like failure. With special acknowledgement to Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia,³ who have compiled a detailed list of historical ‘failures’, here are a few more examples of failure being a step on the road to success.

Famous failures

• Beethoven handled the violin awkwardly and preferred playing his own compositions instead of improving his technique. His teacher called him ‘hopeless as a composer’.

• Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was ‘too stupid to learn anything’. He was fired from his first two jobs for being ‘non-productive’. As an inventor, Edison made 1000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, ‘How did it feel to fail 1000 times?’ Edison replied, ‘I didn’t fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.’

• John Constable’s luminous painting Watermeadows at Salisbury was dismissed in 1830 by a judge at the Royal Academy as ‘a nasty green thing’.

• Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he succeeded.

• A Paris art dealer refused Picasso shelter when he asked if he could bring in his paintings from out of the rain.

• Gertrude Stein submitted poems to editors for nearly twenty years before one was finally accepted.

• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because ‘he lacked imagination and had no good ideas’. He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland and a successful film studio.

• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Jordan once observed, ‘I’ve failed over and over again in my life. That is why I succeed.’

• After Harrison Ford’s first performance as a hotel bellhop in the film Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, the studio vice-president called him in to his office. ‘Sit down, kid,’ the studio head said. ‘I want to tell you a story. The first time Tony Curtis was ever in a movie he delivered a bag of groceries. We took one look at him and knew he was a movie star.’ Ford replied, ‘I thought you were supposed to think that he was a grocery delivery boy.’ The vice-president dismissed Ford with, ‘You ain’t got it, kid, you ain’t got it … now get out of here.’

• The first time Jerry Seinfeld walked on stage at a comedy club as a professional comic, he looked out at the audience and froze. He stumbled through a minute and a half of material and was jeered offstage. He returned the following night and closed his set to wild applause. Check out a similar story in the chapter here on comedian Mikey Robins.

• In 1954, Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis Presley after one performance. He told Presley, ‘You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.’

• Decca Records turned down a recording contract with The Beatles with the unprophetic evaluation, ‘We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on their way out.’

Back to the present

We will find that there is no such thing as failure, and that to live well you must be prepared to risk being wrong and to make mistakes. What seems like failure is almost always a redirection pointing you to places that you are meant to be and best suited to. What this book is truly about though is how to deal with failure when it comes along. That is why we have the examples of ten extraordinary people to guide us, interspersed with chapters that will look at how to move on from failure, how to cope with the emotions it brings and how to deal with all the consequences of what we usually term failure.

What we will cover in this book:

definitions of success and failure beyond the commonplace

how to move on from the initial ‘devastation’ that failure can bring

dealing with the emotions that failure can create

the role of confidence and humility in success and failure

how to cope with criticism

whether developing resilience in response to failure is a good thing

the folly of comparing

exactly what is optimism and whether it is a productive thing

the place of intuition in helping you move on from failure

whether there are in fact any ‘right and wrong’ or ‘good and bad’ in life

what to do when you have ‘made it’ or achieved success

the true essence of a successful life

Personalities who will share their stories

Layne Beachley

Toni Childs

Matthew Elliott

Gerry Harvey

Antonia Kidman

Anne McCullagh Rennie

George Ogilvie

Ruth Ostrow

Mikey Robins

Elka Whalan

‘Success is having an aphorism on success published in a book on failure.’

TERRY ROBSON

2

Layne Beachley

Layne Beachley is a seven-time women’s world surfing champion, entrepreneur, champion of women, and ambassador for many charities. She has been driven by and battled with the demons arising from finding out that she was adopted. Layne has also overcome chronic fatigue and deals with depression. She is immensely down-to-earth and yet philosophical. With her marriage to INXS saxophonist Kirk Pengilly in the planning stages she shared her experience of the ups and downs of life in and out of the surf.

Layne Beachley is the most successful female surfer of all time and seven-time world champion. In 2003 she created the Aim for the Stars Foundation to promote academic, cultural and sporting pursuits supporting the dreams and aspirations of young women across Australia. In 2006, she established the richest women’s surf tour event, the Beachley Classic at Manly Beach, Sydney. In addition to this Layne has been involved as an ambassador, spokesperson and volunteer for many charities including ambassador for Unicef, Breast Cancer, Planet Ark, Club Sporanza, and the Day of Difference Foundation. She is also a businesswoman and has a clothing range, ‘Blue Kiss by Layne Beachley’. Despite these many achievements she has also known failure in a variety of forms.

The success question

When asked how she measures success Layne answers, ‘Success is satisfaction in everything that you do. I was going to say contentment but contentment leads to complacency and that doesn’t lead to success. I look back on my surfing career and I think that was a success because I retired on my own terms. I’m one of the very few people to retire from a professional career feeling incredibly satiated. That satisfaction to me represents success and being able to use the elements that contributed to my success in surfing to build other aspects of my life such as my business and my charities, my event.’

It turns out that her definition of success now is quite different to that she held when she started out as a professional surfer. ‘Back then success to me was achieving a goal that I had set myself, which was to be a world champion, and I didn’t really consider the consequences that were attached to that.’

Catching the wave

Any background on Layne Beachley that you read tells you that at school she was into surfing, tennis and soccer. ‘And cricket, hockey, basketball … she adds with a laugh. What then made surfing stand out above the other sports options? ‘It all crystallised as being surfing when I was about fifteen and I won my first surfing event,’ she says. It was not, however, that she was an immediate success.

‘I actually surfed in my first event when I was about fourteen or fifteen and came dead last. I was incredibly nervous and disappointed. I’d invested so much time and energy into preparing for that event but it taught me so much. It taught me a lot about myself; about how much I really wanted it, how much pressure I put on myself unnecessarily, how immeasurable my expectations were but also how much I loved to compete and measure myself against others.’

Her competitive nature was in fact what allowed her to be part of the surf scene in the first place. ‘I looked to others from a very young age as well, growing up on Manly beach,