How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

by Elizabeth Day

I failed to understand, at the time, that people-pleasing was never going to be a fulfilling way to live.

That in pleasing others, you end up failing to please yourself.

Love this

I have evolved more as a result of things going wrong than when everything seemed to be going right. Out of crisis has come clarity, and sometimes even catharsis.

Arthur Russell in the chorus of ‘Love Comes Back’ that ‘being sad is not a crime’ and that failure contains more meaningful lessons than straightforward success.

What does it mean to fail? I think all it means is that we’re living life to its fullest. We’re experiencing it in several dimensions, rather than simply contenting ourselves with the flatness of a single, consistent emotion.

people-pleaser. I wanted others to like me and accept me and the coping strategy I had developed to survive was predicated almost entirely on their good opinion.

Succeeding at a test means not defining yourself according to the outcome. It means reminding yourself that you exist separately from those ticks in the margin and that most of life is an arbitrary collision of serendipitous or random events and no one is awarding you percentage points for how you live it.

adopt this mindset, of someone who has made the effort to understand who they really are, what they care about and what their values are rather than what grades they think they deserve.

course, that is not to say exams are unimportant. They are. They give you discipline and focus.

‘I mean, life is a continuous negotiation really with yourself and other people and company and the kind of company you want, how much company you want, how much you want to give, how much you want to take, what form and shape that takes. Especially if you’ve had this tremendous shyness as a child [and] still have to some extent.

‘Do you think that maybe, you’ve been through quite a lot already and been operating at a fairly frantic pace, and that perhaps this is a necessary time of reflection, of allowing the next phase to hatch?’

twenties are spices in a pestle and mortar that must be ground up by life in order to release your fullest flavour. By the end of them, you’ll have more heart and more guts – and you’ll know never to roast broccoli again.

‘No one meets anyone in bars any more,’ she said gently, as if explaining a new-fangled machine called a computer to an elderly Amish lady wearing clothes made out of sackcloth.

“You cannot script life. You cannot control life. And that you may decide that this is the narrative that most suits you now, but you can’t control that.”’

giving. That, really, the most important thing about dating was to remember who I was, not to try and work out who the other person was or what I could do to gratify them.

We waste far too much time imagining why the other person is acting the way they are, rather than focusing on what we can do to make ourselves happy and meet our own needs.

‘To admit uncertainty,’ she writes, ‘is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a

strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.’

Both sport and music rely on a degree of public performance. If you’re a perfectionist, like I am, and if you realise, as I do, that your perfectionism is a basic displacement therapy in a world where you’re seeking to impose your own order on the random chaos of the universe while knowing, deep down, that such an action is inherently futile, then sport and instruments hold all sorts of hidden dangers for you. You can’t control how someone else hits the ball to you, or the wind speed or court conditions on any given day and there is nowhere to hide when you split a trumpet note or miss an at-the-net volley. There is simply your own humiliation and self-pity.

It is to find herself worthy of her own respect. It is to turn to her friends for affirmation rather than expecting her lovers to provide it all. It is to treat herself with the same kindness with which she treats the men she is terrified will leave her.

I forgot, in the rush to appear flawless and irreproachable, that it was far more important to be real than to be perfect. Like many women I know, I thought marriage would firm up my shaky sense of self.

I learned that no one else will ever know the truth of your life, just as you will never fully grasp the truth of theirs.

There are few better ways of keeping failures in perspective than muttering ‘It’s the fucking sun’ under your breath (try it; it works). And

That real strength comes from owning your vulnerability and expressing your emotions in a way that is true and calm and powerful.