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

by Elizabeth Day

I also learned that even if your intentions are good, the execution of a task can sometimes be lacking if you don’t have the necessary experience.

What Babe Ruth was essentially saying was this: that in order to succeed on a grand scale, you have to be willing to fail on an equally grand scale too. Often the former relies on the latter, which is why failure can be integral to success, not just on the baseball field, but in life too.

Still, I didn’t much like school. I always felt resentful that I wasn’t in control of my own life. I wanted, more than anything, to be an adult and in charge of my own existence. I was impatient to get on with things, to have a job, to live in my own flat and pay my own rent. In fact, I couldn’t wait to leave.

It got to the stage that if a boyfriend asked me where I wanted to go for lunch, I became paralysed by indecision. I didn’t want to tell them where I wanted to go in case they preferred somewhere else. After a few years of this, I genuinely no longer knew what I wanted to eat anyway and so actively needed someone else to make the decision.

It was ten years of moving forwards while groping blindly for the point of it all; ten years of building a career but feeling impatient at the lack of pace; ten years of wondering who you were meant to be dating and how you would find the mythical right ‘one’; ten years of casually assuming you had all the time in the world while knowing you were running out of it, to the extent that turning thirty seemed to me to be a giant cut-off after which I would never be truly young again.

There is a scene in Less, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Andrew Sean Greer, in which the protagonist is informed that his close friend’s marriage is ending after twenty years. ‘Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success,’ he muses. ‘Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun.’

I walked out of the post office and onto the street and I knew my heart was still open to future wonder. I knew that the sun was still the fucking sun.

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?

It’s easier said than done, of course. I want to be considered attractive and I will spend a certain amount of time getting my grey hairs dyed and ensuring that my pubic hair isn’t overgrown. I like a manicure. Occasionally, I have a spray tan. But I think where my consciousness is beginning to shift is that now I do these things in order to feel good about myself, rather than to feel I’m winning at being like someone else.

I think one of the most important realisations I was left with was an understanding that when it feels as though your career is taking a sideways turn or stagnating, this often ends up leading you unexpectedly to where you most want to be.

Of course, not every failed actor is gifted enough or lucky enough to turn into a bestselling novelist, but I suppose the moral to each of these stories, if there is one, is that 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.

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.

In truth, I do not see my failure to have babies as a personal failure at all. If anything, it is society’s failure for making me feel I’ve not met some invisible standard. Perhaps it is my failure to have allowed that opinion to affect me. But as for the random, extraordinary collision between the right sperm and the right egg at precisely the right time in my biological cycle? I can’t be held responsible for that.