When Success Can be a Mistake and Why Failure is Like Gold

[Read Time (Total): 5 minutes]

The response I tend to get from people when I tell them I messed up is, “Well, we learn from our mistakes.” Whenever someone says that I give it about a second of thought and put it back in my vault of cliche-but-true remarks.

I’ve taken on a lot in the last three months–more than anyone really should. Click the link to see my average week, for the last three months of this year. I fill in activities retroactively to track time-usage but I have a fair amount of it planned before hand–if something comes up, Outlook allows me to move things around very easily.

It wasn’t an issue of “spreading myself too thin.” This is a very carefully crafted schedule optimized over the course of four weeks to assure the highest quality work I could produce in each area. But there was still a problem…

I’ve done very high quality work that I’m proud of in five completely different areas: school, my internship with Conflict Resolution Services, exercise/fitness, research in lifestyle design and professional development, and here on this blog (not to mention being tied up in an incredibly stressful and difficult situation for a couple of months). I’ll spare you the bore of lists and details, but my productivity skyrocketed to say the least.

This term was the first full-scale application of Perato’s Principle and Parkinson’s Law to my life as a whole, and this enabled me to get more done in a fraction of the time with higher quality results than before. Instead of spending 70% of my waking hours with academia, I cut it down to an average 30-35% while learning more, producing my highest quality work yet, and consequently getting awesome grades. To make a long story short, I then filled the time I had just cleared up with work that was just as demanding.

I can actually count the number of times I’ve hung out with friends in the last two months: three. I’ve also been sick on and off for about three weeks so I haven’t been able to exercise.  Looking back, I can pinpoint exactly why I got here: I failed to clearly define the goal of my productivity experiment.

So, my experiment was a success in that I still can’t believe how productive I’ve been, but it was a mistake because there was really no point to it: there was no “result” that I identified, before getting started, against which I could measure the experiment’s success or failure. Like I said before, people often say “we learn from our mistakes” and I definitely learned from mine. I learned that productivity isn’t a goal: a goal is a strictly defined, measurable outcome that you can objectively say has been met successfully (or unsuccessfully as the case may be). For example, “Run a mile in 6 minutes” is a goal. “Run a really fast mile” is not.

“Find a way to read more productively by Friday” is not a goal. “Double my reading speed from 250 wpm to 500 wpm by Friday” is a goal. But it’s not just a matter of defining what “productive” means–it’s more than that. By defining exactly what my goal is, I’m also defining a stopping point. Failing to define a stopping point creates hidden anxiety because it essentially creates a goal that’s, by definition, impossible to meet.

The ironic part about all of this is that in all of my smaller-scale experiments, my first priority is to define my desired outcome in a measurable way.

I think what it all gets down to is this: the value to base achievement on is not absolute maximum productivity, it’s absolute, healthy sustainability in everything you do. These are the kinds of realizations are the ones that people tend to respond to with a sarcastic, “Well duh…” but while it’s pretty intuitively obvious, it’s much harder to actually emotionally appreciate if you’re a “Type A.”

The drive to succeed is a strong local anesthetic for stress. The problem is, after a while the anesthetic wears off and you’re operating way above the threshold you should be at.

If you’re a very driven person like myself and you have experienced this, or do in the future, learn from it. Don’t become one of those overworked “successful” people who hate their life. But even more importantly, don’t become a “successful” person who loves what they do but crashes at regular intervals.

So by any normal standard, my experiment was a failure. Sure it turned out that there was no real goal to begin with, but I crashed and that’s not OK.

Failure is like gold: it’s meaningless in itself, but if we are determined to give it value, it can help to create heights of success that are otherwise unimaginable. I try not to make universal claims but I really think this is true: no one reaches greatness without failing far more than they succeed.

The fear of failure isn’t a problem just because it holds us back from learning, it’s a problem because it strangles creativity. And I’m not talking about “artistic-ness,” I mean that the fear of failure prevents us from being original in our work, no matter what we do. Creativity and originality are one of the the world’s biggest producers of failure, but also essentially the only producer of high-value, meaningful creation.

So if you’re passionate about your work, please do it the best you can and embrace your many failures.

Over the next month I’ll be re-designing my approach and you can be sure there will be a post about what I find.

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