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

by Elizabeth Day

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.

‘Your problem,’ he said, ‘is that every time you miss a shot you dig yourself into a pit of self-loathing out of which it’s impossible to climb. You need to brush it off and be thinking of the next shot.’

‘One way we can motivate is increasing the size of reward,’ Harkness said. ‘The other way is decreasing the size of the task, and that includes the perception of the task … When you can devalue or decrease your perception of the size of the task then you can be much more motivated.’

‘Losing is not a reflection on your potential or on your value as a person,’

‘Instead of asking “Why is everything going down?” the better question is “Why are some things going down?”’ Harkness says. ‘Because now, that starts to become an interesting question … If you can ask specific, accurate questions about what the problems are, you can start gaining specific insight into what you can fix.

That there is no one on this big, wide planet who can understand the you-ness of you more than you.

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

Courage is not a quality you are born with or without like the ability to roll your tongue. You can learn it, and you can practise it and the more you use it, the easier it becomes to think of it as an automatic reflex the next time a dilemma presents itself.

If you treat yourself as high value, it turns out other people are more likely to do so as well. Because when you play big, it’s difficult to feel small.

Friendship can give you the ultimate security of feeling known, seen and cherished as you are. At its simplest, making a friend is a process of finding out more about someone else, and therefore finding out more about yourself. You exist as two people, but in the process you create something new and your friendship is its own life force, with its own particular private jokes and quirks of language.

And so I’ve tried to limit the amount of things that I make myself responsible for to the things that I can actually control

if you can remove your ego from a process, that there really isn’t any difference between success and failure. They’re just both parts of a process. And that you shouldn’t look at failure as something terrible, it just is what it is and you shouldn’t look at success as something great, it just is what it is.’

Success and failure, viewed from this perspective, are the same: it is our reaction to them that makes them either negative or positive.