On my holidays, I read a book called I Promise to Fail by Pedro Chagas Freitas.
Inspired by it and the turmoil in our society, I decided to write about the word we all consider cursed: failure.
I want to address the fear and the feeling of failing or the self-perception of being a failure. I want to challenge some ideas and offer a new perspective. I hope you embrace the notion that failure means living.
Most people I work with feel they have not reached their full potential: they have a job where they are no longer engaged or cannot fulfil the expectations. And when they go home, they have just taken leftovers of themselves. In other words, they don’t see themselves as good professionals, husbands, wives, parents, friends, children. Feeling that we are failing in some role or area of life is very common. That’s why there’s so much discontent in people. That’s not the problem. The real issue rests in inaction. How can someone be unhappy and not react for fear of failing? Have you seen the vicious cycle that can set in?
Pedro Chagas Freitas, in his book, suggests that a reasonable life is the disease of our times. People have settled and are content with a mediocre life. Of course, the more we go along, the more we freeze up. Why are we like this?
Our upbringing is the main reason for the prevailing cultural beliefs. In different settings, paradigms emerge on how to lead our lives well. In southern European cultures, such as Portugal, failure has a negative tone from a young age in educational models. Moreover, success means career status and financial conditions, reflected in the car we drive, the house we live in, the clothes we wear, and the places we go. Those who achieve this are labelled successful and, theoretically, lucky.
It is not always the case. Many people in this kind of life feel trapped in a gilded cage: they have achieved comfortable conditions but are deeply unhappy in their day-to-day lives. It’s difficult to live with this unhappiness: people feel guilty, and ungrateful, and burrow deeper and deeper into a life that doesn’t serve them, an instrumental life, a daily life that only exists to maintain status and apparent comfort. On the other hand, those who don’t achieve status, brightness, or comfort feel like frauds compared with the profile our society values.
There’s a lot of social pressure for us all to be high performers. Super capable. The mum or dad who is always there, the professional who is equally available, up-to-date, and motivated, and the wife or husband who is a role model. There’s pressure to always be on top of the world.
A lot of information programs us in this direction; it’s called the Dictatorship of Happiness.
Not being a certain way in life means we’re not as valid. We do not belong anywhere. It leads us to compare ourselves with our peers and to evaluate our degree of success and failure, not according to what we want but to what we think we are supposed to achieve. All of this is running according to an automatism that makes no sense. If we stop to think, we quickly realize that what will make one person happy differs from what another person needs. But repeatedly, we follow this perspective and don’t question it. We insist on following the same path.
We should stop this automatism that traps us in fear of failure and judgments about ourselves. It’s important to reflect on our needs and what would bring us greater satisfaction.
In a professional setting, some people fail because they have jobs, they have no interest in. They manage to do them, but with self-sacrifice and tearing apart over the years, which is reflected in their performance. The Harrisson Institute’s enjoyment-performance theory advocates that the more interest and enjoyment we have in doing a task, the more energy we generate, the greater the reward effect, and the greater the desire to do more. The result? A better performance.
In other cases, performance may not be affected. However, the personal price we pay for putting up with a job we don’t see ourselves in or that doesn’t interest you is so high that it will have repercussions on other crucial aspects, such as health or relationships.
Rather than insisting on powering a situation that we know isn’t good for us, we should legitimize and become aware of it. Be curious. You can find the clues to adjust and balance between yourself and life.
Of course, you may fail because there will always be something that doesn’t go as you hoped. That’s part of life. You need to learn to live with it, accept it, and learn from it. Look at what happened and:
– Analyse what went well and what you can repeat.
– Evaluate what went wrong and decide what you can do differently.
Failing once or many times is different from being a failure.
No human being is a failure. Everyone is valid and deserves respect. However, respect starts with us, and it is something we often fail to do. We need to cultivate self-compassion, which involves learning to recognize needs and work on them rather than always trying to prove something to others. Throughout your life, the only person who will be constant is you. All other relationships will be temporary. We will have to deal with ourselves at the end of our lives. And this is shown by the various studies on regrets at the end of life: at the top of the answers comes the most brutal of all: ‘I regret having gone after what others or society expected of me instead of doing what I felt like doing’.
Is this what you want? I don’t think so.
Dare to fail, once, twice, many times. That will only mean this: that you dared to live according to a belief defined solely by you.
And now tell me: what did I fail at in this article so I can write the next one better?
