The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 23 - Why You Should Embrace Failure: Elizabeth Day

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Failure is something which we will all inevitably meet throughout our lives, yet it’s something we all seem to have an incredibly toxic relationship with. Elizabeth Day is the author of ‘Failosophy’ and host of ‘How To Fail with Elizabeth Day’ so it’s no surprise that Elizabeth has a thing or two to say about failure. In this ‘moment’ from the podcast, Elizabeth and I read a couple of her 7 principles on failure from her book. Episode 77 - https://g2ul0.app.link/Iv9fxRGJzjb Elizabeth: https://twitter.com/elizabday https://www.instagram.com/elizabday/

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I want to talk about failure. Yes. Now, which seems like a good thing to talk about and in your book philosophy you you list uh seven failure principles so I'm sure you've done this a million times but I think it's a good good place to start so the seven failure principles yes number one failure just is.

Yes. So that actually just feeds in with what we were talking about, which is the idea that failure is a fact. It's inevitable. It's going to happen to all of us. No matter how much we try to avoid it, I guarantee that it will happen. And that can feel scary, but it can also feel liberating because once you've accepted it as a fact, there's no point in trying to avoid it. So you might as well take the risk. So acceptance of failure starts with the observation of it. Failure is a fact, but how you respond to it is within your control. Whether you decide to feel like a failure for many years after the thing that's happened, or whether you think to yourself, okay, well, that's taught me something and I'll do it differently next time.

I guess the risk there is one bad failure, and people stop trying. Exactly. And then I was thinking, this is very similar to confidence in the way that like, if you have one bad failure, your performance next time you get an opportunity, if you actually don't manage to just avoid it completely, will probably be worse because of nerves and that, the memory of I'm terrible. And then that's going to increase your chances of failing again and then the kind of like self-negative reinforcing cycle kind of continues and you your confidence and your sort of yeah your guts kind of cascade downwards and can for some people work in the other direction where you have a success your confidence builds you walk on stage to do that you know public speech next time around with a bit more confidence you do a better job which increases your chance of success and it cascades

upwards that how failure works from your experience it can work like that i mean to take the example you've just given one of the ways of looking at that if you're then stuck in a downward cycle and you're failing and you're trying the thing is that you're therefore in the wrong situation so you're in the wrong workplace, for instance, that isn't generous enough to make you feel okay after your failures or doesn't make you feel like you can be your true self. In which case, I would argue you need to remove yourself from that situation and find the place that does suit you. Or it can be a question of mindset and a question of applying that mindset that we've just talked about, which is, okay, I failed. I'm feeling in a downward spiral. How much of that is fact? That's a very difficult

thing to do on your own when you're a very low ebb. And that's why I'm a huge advocate of therapy. And again, I know that I come from a privileged place where I can afford therapy, but even if it starts with reaching out to your friend and talking about it or reaching out to your work helpline and talking about it or texting, shout the mental health charity or calling the Samaritans, that's a really valuable step. And the other thing that I would say there is that I'm very aware that my definition of failure, which is what happens when life doesn't go according to plan, has a fatal flaw, which is that sometimes there are failures that are totally cataclysmic, that we couldn't possibly have predicted, that go against any plan whatsoever,

like a global pandemic, like a terrible illness that you contract, like the death of a loved one, it would be monstrous for me to sit here and say, those failures are as easily assimilated or learned from or dealt with as fading your driving test. And so I'm not saying that at all. Those kind of failures will require a process of mourning and coming to terms with the thing that you've lost. And that's absolutely right and as it should be. My only thing is the way that I choose to live my life is I mourn, but I don't have to constantly relive the pain. I can still feel sadness about something, but I don't need to live in that place of reliving it constantly. Becoming a victim? Yeah. And becoming defined by that. I can choose to be defined by something else. I can choose to

be defined by my response to it. I can choose to find some kind of meaning in something that was meaningless at the time. And that's how I choose to live my life because that makes it less sad and I and I think that that choice is available for most of us so point number two in your book is almost everyone feels they have failed in their 20s I mean not you okay so Stephen Barlow I'm pretty sure do you think you failed in your 20s probably personally sorry no no no it's a good question actually multiple times yeah yeah started my first business at 18 it was clearly a failure left that when I was 20 years old failed in loads of relationships fail every day in business not the big like momentous failures other than my business like one would assert but no I felt probably more than anybody to be fair

I think that's so great to hear yeah and also i think that a lot of people struggle in their 20s particularly in this day and age because of the curse of comparison and because we live in a culture of curated perfection where you're constantly comparing yourself to your peers filtered appearance on instagram and the life that they seem to be living so we're comparing our insides with everyone else's projection of their outsides. Exactly, yeah. And for many people, although I know not you,

but for many people, it's the first time that they've come out of full-time education and come out of a system of exam and reward, exam and reward. And there is no exam that you can sit to show that you're being a good grownup. So you feel quite lost. Plus piling on top of that,

the pressure to find your passion, to like make a career for yourself, but also to earn enough to pay your rent, living in house shares, like just trying to make your way and trying to forge your identity in this day and age. It's just so hard to do all that at once. And then you're like, oh, and I should be having like a thriving personal life. And I should either be in a long-term relationship or having one night stands and making footloose and fancy free and drinking loads. And then at the weekend making vegan brownies, cause I got to watch what I eat and all of that sort of stuff. And it's exhausting. And so really what I wanted to say in that failure principle was that so many people come on podcasts and say that they feel they failed at their 20s and I think a lot of us

fall into the trap and I did too of believing that we had to have our life sorted out by then and actually your 20s are a decade of transition of discovering who you are of grinding up the spices of life in your pestle and mortar and And the older you get, my experience has been the more you know yourself and the more you know what you want to do. And that's where success lies. I've had so many more opportunities after leaving my twenties behind in the rear view mirror.