Have you ever felt like a failure for stopping an activity or hobby? Many of us can probably relate to the feeling of freshness that a new hobby brings to our life. When something is so new and exciting and fun and it’s all you want to be doing. Maybe it’s playing a new instrument, learning a new language, or doing a fitness routine. Maybe you once took up baking and bought all the recipe books and special tools and invested hours into watching YouTubers make sourdough, then you made a few loaves and promptly left your baking days behind.
It’s those moments when we remember that we left an activity behind that often send us into a spiral of self-judgment. The “ugh, this is why I’ll never be really good at anything”, or the “what a waste of money, I’m so bad at spending wisely” or the classic “another failure, all I do is fail”.
When failure is the only thing you do consistently.
It can sometimes feel like the only consistent activity you do is fail to keep up with what you wish you were doing. But it’s that word again, isn’t it? Failure. It’s become such a recurring part of our personal narrative. We’ve failed if we don’t achieve our ultimate dream job. We’ve failed if we’re not as beautiful or as slim as so-and-so. We’ve failed if we were trying to eat healthier and then ate a doughnut. We’ve failed if we were trying to meditate every day and then forgot about it for a week.
So why do we think like this? Why are we forcing ourselves to try and fit into a mould of absolutes?
Failure has taken on a new meaning.
Literally, failure means “lack of success”. To which you might think “exactly, I’m not successful, therefore I’m a failure”. To which I ask - what difference does it make?
Let’s think on a macro level for a moment, as broadly as we can. Why would the average person think that they - in general - are not “successful”? What does “successful” even look like? Someone who’s rich? Or famous? Or in really great shape? Or won a Pulitzer? It’s probably going to mean something different to everyone, but there are also these very broad ideas that have become so pervasive that even if we might not be thinking them directly, they are still in our consciousness as some standard to which we have to hold ourselves.
And sometimes, the answer to “why aren’t you successful?” is simply “because I’m too much of a failure to ever be successful”. So we can’t be successful because we’re a failure, and we always fail because we’re not successful enough not to fail. Yikes.
How do we achieve success in a world of failure?
There are probably thousands of business and personal development books that would disagree with me on this, but my theory is that in order to stop failing, the main thing we can try and do is stop thinking about failure. Because really, what we tend to do is look at micro things under a weirdly macro lens. So you ate a doughnut - what difference does it make? Why would a goal of “eat healthier” have a finite time period within your life that begins with an ultimatum and ends with a doughnut? If your goal was “learn Japanese” and then you were on a great streak where you learned some vocabulary every day for a couple of weeks and then stopped for a little while, what difference does it make? Does that little while of not learning new words undo all the words you learned before that? Does it prevent you from learning a new word today? Or tomorrow? Or the next day?
The case may be that you dove into a new hobby or activity and then after a while it was just hard to enjoy it as much as you did at the beginning, or something else in your life changed and the new hobby just didn’t fit as well with your new obligations. Maybe you’ll come back to it someday. Maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ve decided it’s not worth the time/effort/money/etc right now, in which case maybe you want to just sell or donate your new hobby accoutrements, or put them at the back of the closet for another time. Either way - that’s not failure. That’s just things changing. That’s life.
A lot of our ideas about success and failure are ingrained from a young age, and we got used to applying these terms to situations that simply don’t warrant them. And we might just be better off eschewing them completely. “Success” as a broad term just isn’t a viable goal because it means something different depending on every context.
It’s not a failure, it’s an opportunity for growth.
Life is complicated, and it’s only ever getting more complicated. But every activity we do has the potential to enrich us in some way - even if partaking in that activity the only insight you gain is “I hate this activity”, that’s still an insight. That’s still something you learned. It’s still a new item that you added to your already long list of life experiences.
We’re not all in as much competition as it appears. While there can be value in competition under certain circumstances, it’s both unhealthy and unhelpful to create competition where there is none, particularly when it causes us to create abstract ideas of what winning would look like. If our idea of success is some outlandish ideal that we created in our minds, how do we ever expect to achieve it? Sadly, sometimes we don’t, and we’re subconsciously setting ourselves up for failure. Which again shows that we’re forcing these labels of success and failure into situations in which they really have no business. It’s just what we’re used to doing. At best it’s a habit and at worst it’s an addiction that leads us into dark cycles of judgment and self criticism, based entirely outside the realms of logic and rationality.
In the game of success, maybe the real secret isn’t about how to win. Maybe the real value is in refusing to play at all.