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

by Elizabeth Day

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.

‘being sad is not a crime’

It’s going to happen, so you might as well have a strategy for how you deal with failure, and then once you’ve got that in your back pocket, you can go out in life and really take risks.’

frantic ticking of external boxes (degree; career; professional success) that I was all right. That I did have stuff to offer. That I was worth being friends with. That I was worth being loved.

And maybe I wouldn’t have such a wonderful circle of dear friends had I not also acquired the certain knowledge that acceptance is a fragile and fickle thing, and isn’t to be taken for granted. That you need to look after your friendships as you would your own health.

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.

“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.”’

The strongest people can afford to be vulnerable and retain their dignity.

‘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.’

And I discovered that when you forget to think, you paradoxically have some of your best thoughts. Your subconscious is allowed the space to breathe.

I wanted to feel cold, so that my body was more fully in tune with the internal pain I couldn’t yet process.

My inability to express myself, for one. If you don’t say what you need, it’s much harder for people to give it to you.

And when you’re trying to be perfect, you’re not being truthful about your own imperfections.

Life crises have a way of doing that: they strip you of your old certainties and throw you into chaos. The only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking, into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.

who seemed so much more relaxed around their children than families back in London because they viewed parenthood as simply part of a wider life rather than the wholesale definition of it.

I 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.

‘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

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

Maybe kindness could be separated from meekness and maybe saying no didn’t make me into a bad person

I came to the realisation that the only

way to be the sort of writer I wanted to be was to create my own opportunities. ‘If you want to be Elizabeth Day, novelist, you have to see yourself as Elizabeth Day,

whatever you might tell yourself, an employer is never going to feel sentimental about you.

I was, in essence, far clearer about my own worth because when you take a massive gamble on yourself, you have to be the one who believes in your own value.

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.

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. What feels like professional failure can be distilled into a great opportunity,

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.

‘The loss of a miscarriage is not talked about enough.

‘I want to tell all the women out there – it is not over at forty. It begins. And it even begins more at fifty.’

Ultimately, if you are in the business of creating things, then you have to make peace with the reality that not everyone will like or understand what you’ve created, at the same time as you must acknowledge we live in a time when opinions are the most frequently traded global currency.

it was profoundly important to value my own opinion.

Living your life according to what everyone else might think of you is to cede control of who you are.

So the challenge is to be both thin-skinned and thick-skinned.

That all those negative thoughts and anxious feelings could be silenced and we would still be ourselves. He went on to say that we should strive to treat everything that happens to us – the good and the bad – as if it had been an active decision on our part. So if someone dumps you, the idea is that you chose for that

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