Altering My Outlook On Failure
I first heard about Sara Blakely around the time that she splashed the cover of Forbes Magazine in 2012 as one of the youngest self-made billionaires on the magazine’s Billionaire’s List. Her face was everywhere— from airport magazine racks to grocery store checkout aisles. You couldn’t miss her. By then, everyone had heard about her company, Spanx. I skimmed the articles and news stories about her success and was completely in admiration that she started Spanx in her house with only $5,000 in personal savings. She was self-made, owned 100% of Spanx and grew it all without seed money or funding. I mentally added Sara to my list of admirable women and I moved on.
That was my mistake!
THE BRILLIANCE OF SARA
A few months later I caught an interview of Sara, speaking with a journalist about her new Masterclass sessions and I was floored by her charisma and story. I actually had to rewind and watch the interview a few more times, regretting that I had not learned more about her sooner. In the interview, Sara was dynamic, enthusiastic and so very real, which was a pleasant surprise. I was most impacted by her story around failure.
Sara shared, “When I was a child, my father used to encourage my brother and me to fail. At the dinner table, instead of asking about the best part of our day, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn’t have something to tell him, he would be disappointed. When we shared whatever failure we’d endured, he’d high-five us and say, ‘Way to go!’ The gift my father gave us by doing this was redefining what failure truly meant.”
Here is the important part, she said, “it changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome–failure is not trying. Don’t be afraid to fail.” Let that sink in a little. Failure is not something to be feared and avoided at all costs.
I had heard inspirational stories around life lessons, and I’ve been known to blab on to friends about trying to find the silver lining in hardship, but I had never heard of failure framed in such a way. The words, “failure is an opportunity to learn and grow,” had never entered my mind. The thought that I could be liberated from fearing failure was huge and completely new to me.
WOW MOMENT
Sara’s perspective on failure gave me my “wow” moment. It’s hard to admit it to you all, but I am wired around results and success. It’s part of who I am and it started as a large part of my upbringing and education. So, for my entire life, I’ve held myself to an almost ridiculous standard of perfection. Failure was not an option— it was a nasty word that ate away at my self-esteem and made me question myself daily. I often beat myself up on a regular basis about mistakes and regrets—my drive home from work is frequently my time to beat myself up about what happened in the day, and I find myself going through every regret, including everything I said, missed or did incorrectly. Just typing the word failure gives me anxiety.
For years I have recognized this behavior as detrimental and destructive. I’ve been working on myself in various ways to improve myself and let go of my perfectionism. But hearing Sara speak so passionately and enthusiastically about failure hit me hard. I have never had anyone talk about failure so eloquently and with so much embrace for its connection to positive lessons. It was definitely an epiphany moment— I was forever impacted.
I reflected on this newfound knowledge of failure for a few days. The new perspective hit me harder than expected and resulted in a few realizations: I am paralyzed by failure, it is holding me back from achieving my dreams and it is wasting my valuable energy every day. In a search to find the silver lining in my struggles, I started to think about how I could reframe my past to better inform and inspire my future. I wrote down fears and focused on thinking about mistakes as lessons for next time. Then I made a big life decision and decided it was time to earn that MBA that I had always dreamt about pursuing.
With my degree now complete—graduation celebrated in quarantine— my MBA journey was crucial for self-improvement, knowledge, confidence and especially my attitude towards leadership. I tackled difficult subjects, faced test anxiety and confronted challenging personalities and bullies. I put myself into situations far outside of my comfort zone. To my surprise, I fell in love with learning and writing again, something that I never thought that would happen for me. I pushed myself to try new things at work and moved my career into a new area of expertise focused on product marketing. I challenged myself to learn new technologies and work styles, as well as connect with new people.
But more importantly, I worked hard at reframing the role of failure in my life. It is a work in progress. I can’t tell you that it happened over night and I definitely can’t tell you that I have arrived. I believe that I will be working on this part of myself for a long time to come—I am a work in progress! There has been much growth! I celebrate that I am now able to recognize patterns and behaviors of perfectionism and that I’ve gotten much better at asking for help, pushing myself to be uncomfortable and identifying my fears.
FAILURE IS THE BEST TEACHER
In many of Sara Blakely’s interviews and articles, she shares that she wanted to go to law school but bombed the LSAT several times. She jokes that maybe if she was a better test taker, Spanx would not exist. What a shame that would be! Did you know that Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school varsity basketball team his sophomore year? He often shares in interviews that he went home, shut himself in his room and cried. But then he picked himself up and used his rejection as motivation to push himself to practice and work harder. “Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it,” Jordan would explain. “That usually got me going again.“
Walt Disney was fired from a Missouri newspaper for not being creative enough and his first venture, Laugh-o-Gram Studios, went bankrupt. J.K. Rowling, she was a divorced single mother who was broke, depressed and on welfare when she was inspired to write Harry Potter. Stephen King had his first book, Carrie, rejected from publishers 30 times. Oprah was fired from her first job as a TV anchor in Baltimore. And on many occasions, Steve Jobs famously shared that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him. In his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, he explained,
A NEW MINDSET
So, I challenge you to rethink and revise your outlook on failure. It takes some time and effort. With the right mindset, reframing failure can be a positive in your life. Removing the fear will help you to be more creative, innovative, thoughtful, mindful or even laser-focused on achieving your dreams. Don’t be afraid to try new things, meet new people, take on new responsibilities and let go of the burden of what other people think. Start small and move slowly towards the larger challenges. Give yourself a chance to build this failure mindset into your thinking. Time to turn your “mistakes” into positives and release the power that the fear of failure has over us.
I will leave you with one of my favorite Sara Blakely quotes:
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