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

by Elizabeth Day

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. That in doing so, you are trying to shore up your dwindling internal confidence by collecting the positive opinions of others, without realising that this never works;

failure has taught me lessons I would never otherwise have understood. 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.

Although going through negative experiences is never pleasant, I’m grateful for it because in retrospect, I can see that I have made different, better decisions because of them. I can see that I have become stronger.

in order to succeed on a grand scale, you have to be willing to fail on an equally grand scale too.

strikes me that school is not simply a place where academic lessons are taught but also a place where we educate ourselves on who we are; where we can try out different identities and see what fits before the constraints and responsibilities of adulthood are upon us.

my failure to fit in also had less positive effects. It made me, at an early age, into a 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. I wasn’t particularly selective about who liked me, I just hankered after safety in numbers which meant that for years I flailed around trying to fit in anywhere I could.

It’s a fairly standard human impulse: if I’m not going to succeed at this, the reasoning goes, then I’m not going to try. That way, I’ll lessen the humiliation when, inevitably, it comes.

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.

I mistakenly thought that the best way of feeling better about myself was to get other people to like me and to attempt to survive on the fumes of their approbation.

that shifting tension between where you wanted to be, where you thought you should be and where you were right now.

your twenties are often when you first come face to face with mortality, with the sense that all of us are, to a lesser or greater degree, running out of time.

For a long time, my default was to think I had done something wrong, rather than believing it might just be that the other person had their own emotional baggage to carry.

I had to learn that rejection was not necessarily a personal indictment of who I was, but a result of the infinite nuance of what the other person was going through, which in turn was the consequence of an intricate chain of events, shaped by their own experiences and their own family dynamics and past relationships, that had literally nothing to do with me.

“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.”’

Sometimes the difficulty and the beauty are entwined, and you can’t get to one without experiencing the other because you won’t be able to recognise or value the good stuff for what it is when it comes along.

‘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.’

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,

‘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.

we think that in order to try hard, things have to be very, very important. So we think the only way you can motivate yourself to try hard is to emphasise the importance of the event or the outcome. The problem is, the more you emphasise, the more pressure you create.

‘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.’

Maybe the value is in the task itself, not the execution of it.

My people-pleasing ramped up several notches. I couldn’t bear the thought of someone – anyone, really – not liking me, because if I could control how others felt about me, I thought maybe I could control the scary prospect of them walking out of the door and never coming back. It was a form of insecurity, I suppose, and perhaps a form of narcissism too. I got off on others saying and believing nice things about me. And the absurd double-bind of people-pleasing is that you can persuade yourself it’s a selfless act, that your primary goal in life is to think of others, to look after them and help them be their best selves.

And it did pass. It was just a feeling, I reminded myself. The anxiety did not define me and I was still me without it.

learned that if your life is not how you want it to be, then it is never too late to change that life. You just have to be brave enough to take the leap over the side. It will panic you, and make you scared, but once you allow those feelings to subside and once the vortex calms, you will rediscover yourself and find that the world is large and beautiful and offers an endless opportunity to do different things.

‘And I just thought, where did we get this shame from?’ Jenny K said. ‘Our bodies have given birth to children! We’ve got pubic hair because we’re not prepubescent. Who was it who told us we had to be ashamed of these things rather than celebrating them?’

We exist in a world where youth (particularly female youth) is fetishised, celebrated and often sexualised, while paedophilia is – rightly – viewed with outright horror and criminalised. But in porn, there seems to me to be a worryingly thin line between the two. Where does the lascivious admiration of youth stop before it becomes something altogether more abhorrent?

for women to be more comfortable with our bodies, we should not be ashamed of our realness. We should, instead, honour the amazing things our bodies can do and the way our bodies adapt to the passing of time, rather than seeking to exist in a freakish state of cryogenic youth.

Age is not weakness; it is the opposite. It is the evolution of self-knowledge. It is profoundly powerful.

say that and I believe it, while at the same time being worried about a vertical wrinkle on my forehead, the legacy of thirty-nine years of frowning when I type. But my hope is that if I say it and believe it often enough, that belief will become like a muscle I flex and it will build up and strengthen until I no longer have to question it, and the forehead wrinkle will be something I am proud of for what it represents – a life lived with ambition and drive and application; a life of words typed on a screen that connect with people who read them. That is fulfilment. That is beauty. And ultimately, that’s what lasts.

What a gift that is: to move, to feel, to be.

It was a good lesson. It taught me that, whatever you might tell yourself, an employer is never going to feel sentimental about you. You might believe you have established loyal and reciprocal personal connections with your bosses and maybe you have, but the chances are that when push comes to shove, they are never going to place your interests on an equal footing to those of the organisation you work for.

making brave decisions gets easier the more you flex the muscle of your emotional resilience. 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.

no experience is wasted, even if you have no idea of what that particular experience is teaching you during the time you’re enduring it.

you treat yourself as high value, it turns out other people are more likely to do so as well.

my default response when things go wrong is always to turn reflection inwards and believe it’s something I have or haven’t done, or some quality that is fatally lacking in me.

Perhaps we should also have been taught that responsibility for safe sex is not solely the female preserve – right down to putting on a condom for a man. Is it beyond the realms of reason to expect that if a man wants to have sex with you, he is able to summon up enough energy and commitment to unwrap the packet and put the condom on using his own fair hands? Or are we destined forever to be treated as concubines in the service of our superior male bedfellows, who do us the erotic favour of penetration?

As with many people, when confronted with a medical official, particularly a male one, my default reaction is to accept everything that is being said and be grateful for their beneficence. To not kick up a fuss, but to be one of the ‘good’ patients, who appreciated the stressful nature of their job.

female starlet I met had an absent father, and it was interesting how many of them attributed their ambition and drive to a desire to make this unknown figure proud, as if their fame and success would finally redress the unspoken wrongs in order to make them loveable enough for their father to stay.

took me a long time to realise that I can’t change other people. And I can’t actually control other people. I don’t control what they do. I can only control myself. The way I think of it now is I don’t need my family to change for me to love them, but I need them to change to have them in my life.

since I can’t control their behaviour, I can only control what I do in response to their behaviour,

I often find myself feeling as if I’m pressing my nose up against the window, looking at an untouchable group I cannot be part of.

we regularly ingest cultural messages that suggest that women’s rage is irrational, dangerous or laughable.’

When men are angry it’s usually assumed to be for a reason. When women are angry it’s been considered unfeminine, or a character defect.’

Rather than speaking out, I had removed myself from the situation. My way of tackling it had been silence; an absence where I should have made my presence felt.

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.’

Whether someone else determines your work as successful or unsuccessful is ultimately simply an opinion generated by that person’s own experiences, expertise and set of assumptions. Living your life according to what everyone else might think of you is to cede control of who you are. It is to outsource your identity to a bunch of strangers who do not know you. Which is why I now try to remind myself only to care about the people I love, the people who count, or the people whose judgement I trust and respect because they know what they’re talking about.

go to therapy to understand the mind better: the extraordinary wonder of its infinitesimally designed precision and the associated danger of its ability to trick one into thinking all the bad things we imagine are facts when, in truth, they are just thoughts which are, in turn, a product of our experience. We exist separately from our thoughts.