The Wellness Scoop - Learning to Fail

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

We talk to Elizabeth day, host of How To Fail, about failing at body insecurity, relationships, wellness, children, families and careers; looking at how failure is an intrinsic part of success, how our mistakes help to move us closer to what we want, the importance of vulnerability and embracing our flaws. We’re looking at all of our biggest failures, what we’ve learnt from them and how that openness is able to connect us and allow us to get to know ourselves better. Elizabeth Day - How To Fail, Book & Podcast The Mo Gawdat episode is episode 4 of season 4 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Delicious Yellow podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ella Mills. Hi, guys. So today we are talking about the importance of failure. Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. That's the quote by Truman Capote at the start of How to Fail, Elizabeth Day's fantastic book on the importance of celebrating all the things that haven't gone right in our lives. So Elizabeth runs my favorite podcast, How to Fail, and Sky and I have listened to every episode as we walk around the park and Leslie trying to get her to sleep.

And every episode starts by telling us that learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. Elizabeth talks to people that we look up to about their three biggest failures in their life and what they've learned from them, showing us that firstly, everyone fails no matter how successful they appear to be on the surface. And secondly, that there is so much to learn from our mistakes. So welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. What a lovely introduction. I love the idea of Sky being fed all this story of failure and how to succeed. Yeah, exactly.

So I have just admitted this to you, but I am your biggest fan. And I definitely, you know, first person put my hand up and say, I can definitely be insecure and kind of worry that I'm the only person getting things wrong so I definitely have found it so reassuring listening to all these people that you look up to and think they must have got everything right and actually they haven't because it's only human not to do that so I'd love to actually start by asking why did you start talking about failure because it's obviously something that we're all quite slow to admit to and nervous to put our hands up about because we feel like it's a sign of weakness

and that people might think that we're not good at what we do if we admit it. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for saying that. I'm very honoured to think of you being my number one fan because I'm your number one fan. But I have always been someone who's quite open. So I'm a bit of an oversharer in the sense that if you find yourself sitting next to me at dinner, I will go deep quite soon.

And I'm really interested in hearing other people's stories as well, which is why before I did How to Fail, I wrote novels, because I'm super interested in what makes people tick. So I think that came to me quite naturally. But actually, the reason that I started thinking about failure more specifically is because I found myself three weeks before my 39th birthday, just having been dumped. And my 30s were a decade of enormous transition where my life had not gone according to plan. So I had got married and then divorced.

I had tried and failed to have children. And then another long- term relationship had ended. And I was left looking back on that decade, worried that I had somehow wasted my time. And it was in the aftermath of the end of that relationship that I found myself listening to a lot of podcasts, because if you've ever been dumped, you will know that listening to any kind of music will just make you wail on the street. And so I started listening to podcasts. And at the same time as I was listening to podcasts, I was reflecting a lot on my life. And I was having conversations with female friends about life and love and loss. And it was during that time that I realised that as much as my 30s hadn't gone to plan, I had never understood my own strength. So the fact that I was capable of withstanding all of those things taught me something very integral to who I was as a person. Because I do genuinely believe, as you say, that learning how to fail makes you more real and more in tune with your authentic self. And that, in turn, leads to you being able to lead a more, quote unquote, successful life. I know I found it can be quite scary making yourself so vulnerable. And I don't know whether you found the same thing or whether or not you kind of it's picked up as as the podcast is built and more and more people listen to it but that sense of

completely kind of exposing yourself and your flaws I know I do it sometimes well I'll do it on here for example I tell people all my kind of biggest insecurities and fears and then I walk into the office or you know you walk into a room of people and you think gosh I've just told everyone what I think I'm rubbish at and what I've got wrong and and does that mean they're all going to think I'm rubbish? Did it take you a while to get comfortable with that sense of kind of vulnerability? It did. It's funny, actually, because I'm now with a really wonderful man who I met him before How to Fail came out, before it even started. And he joked... Next up, How to Succeed. Exactly. But he joked that actually reading How to Fail in my novels was a really great user manual to Elizabeth Day because everything is sort of there.

But two things I want to say about that. One was when I put my podcast out, so the podcast came first and then I wrote the book after the first season of the podcast had aired. When I put the podcast out, I really didn't know what I was doing. I felt that it was an idea that I wanted to explore, and I felt that really passionately. But it was very personal to me, and I asked my friends and my contacts to be my first eight guests. I hired a guy that I found through Google to record it.

I sold my wedding dress to pay for the first few episodes, and I put it out there, and I thought it might only exist as eight episodes, but they existed in the way that I wanted them to exist and I was fine with it if only my parents listened. But what happened then was there were thousands and thousands of downloads overnight and that made me more confident in sharing and being vulnerable

because I realised that actually what I thought of as my most personal things turned out to have a much more universal resonance than I'd realised. And it's been a beautiful gift for me to realise that out of all of the work that I've done professionally, and I've been a journalist for 20 years, I've written novels, I've interviewed celebrities for magazines, but it was this that had the most connection and the most response. And I was like, oh, and that's when I'm not

pretending to be anyone. And it was a really lovely thing. So there's that element. And there's also the element that when it came to writing the book, I was clear about the things that I wanted to discuss. I was like, I need to set my parameters. So the subjects that I choose to discuss, for instance, there's a whole chapter on failing at babies and how I went through IVF and it failed. And then I had a miscarriage at three months. I was very aware that I, within those parameters, needed to be totally honest and comfortable with being totally honest about those subjects. But there are subjects that I just haven't written or talked about at all. And that's mainly because they involve other people. And I don't want to exploit their stories or tell a version of events that isn't accurate.

So I also do set boundaries. But having set those boundaries, then I need to be willing to like go there. And have you found that's really allowed you to connect so much more with people? Because I've definitely noticed that is I know when I started the Shasiela, I hadn't told anyone that I'd been sick. You know, I basically just shut myself away. I was really kind of nervous of it. And I defined myself by it in a quite a negative way. When suddenly, because I'd been sick you know I basically just shut myself away I was really kind of nervous of it and I defined myself by it in a quite a negative way when suddenly because I'd said it people come up to you and they tell you their kind of deepest darkest secrets and it's it's really interesting because it can be someone you've only known for like five minutes and suddenly you see the side of them that other people have seen them for knowing them for ages and ages haven't had the kind of privilege almost of seeing and it's like you can kind of get to know people on a kind of much more almost authentic as you said level

I totally agree with you and and that again has been a really moving thing for me and something that I'm incredibly touched and honored by that people do share their stories with me now and people again like you who I've never met who might message me on Instagram or come up to me at an event I'm doing. A lot of women who have had fertility issues or experienced miscarriage. And again, because I think that there's an enormous amount of shame still. And the reason I talk about it in the context of failure is that you do feel like you failed as a woman. You shouldn't, but you're kind of made to feel that by the medical establishment who talk in terms of you failing to respond to the drugs or you have an inhospitable womb. I mean, that's actually something a friend of mine was told.

And so you're made to feel this failure. And as a result, there's still a degree of taboo around it. So I had the experience as soon as I started being open about the stuff that I'd gone through of really good friends of mine who had never told me that they had also had miscarriages and sometimes they had gone on and had children and they felt guilty almost that to talk about the miscarriage because they didn't want to appear ungrateful so there's all this sort of stuff that that I think particularly women and Matthew I'm sure you can tell us maybe men really struggle with but it has been really wonderful and beautiful for me to be able to be a part of bringing those stories more to light and that's why I want to just keep on doing

it because I do think that you know I do live events I'm about to go on tour and uh who do I think I am Mick Jagger it's outrageous but I am about to go on a How To Fail live tour and the live events are so special because there's a 30 minute section at the end of the show where we call it a Q&A. But actually, it's a forum for people to share what they perceive as their own failures and to ask for advice. And it's this real community that builds up around it. And it's such a special atmosphere. And I just feel that so strongly the source of our true strength as human beings is being open about our vulnerability. I suppose it's the openness about vulnerability and just the ultimate resilience of humans as well just how great we are rebounding

and kind of getting on even when things aren't going particularly well. Yeah and even from a sort of biological perspective there's that fact about how you regenerate every single cell in your body every seven years. And I find that so optimistic, such a hopeful thing to think that actually it's never too late to change your life. And that's definitely my experience in my 30s was absolutely that. I thought growing up, I always imagined I would be married and have kids and live in a terrorist house in London, and everything would go according to a sort of tick box schedule, where at this age, I would have achieved these things. And that didn't happen. And actually, what I realised was, of course, it was sad that it didn't happen. And there's been a great deal of grief along the way.

But it's also really liberating to be released from that expectation not only society's expectation but your own expectation that you set on yourself and now I try much more to live in the present which is obviously the hardest thing to do but I do try to and from exploring this topic of failure yourself and with the other guests you've had on your podcast what have been the most powerful lessons that you've learned from this shared common denominator we all have as human beings, which is failing every day on a different spectrum, some small failures that we have each day,

some much bigger ones. What have been your biggest learnings from that? So one of my biggest learnings is from my favorite episode of the podcast ever. I know you're not meant to have favorites, but it was with Mo Gowda. And I know Ella, you've kindly said that you really love that episode as well. He was a former chief business officer at Google X. And he realized that he wasn't happy, even though everything in his life on paper seemed to be great. So he had a wonderful family, a wonderful job, loads of money, cars in the garage. And he decided to use his engineering and statistical skills to developing an algorithm for happiness. And this algorithm basically says, it's more sophisticated than this, but if you live your life without expectation, then you end up being happier.

And it was an algorithm that was put to the ultimate test for Mo because his son died age 21 during a routine operation. And Mo had to apply this equation to the most traumatic grief any of us can probably imagine. And one of the things that he said was that you exist separately from your brain, which has its foundations in kind of Buddhist thought, which is that you are not your worst, most anxious thoughts, that if you can start by observing them, that is the path to ultimate enlightenment, because you exist separately from the things, all the terrible things that you might think about yourself and all the worried things that you might think are going to happen. And Mo takes this to this wonderful, logical and slightly humorous extension of naming his brain. he names his brain becky because

becky was an annoying girl at his school he was always pointing out when things went wrong rather than when things would go right and he will actually talk to his brain when his brain is unspooling this kind of anxious narrative he'll say well what's your objective evidence for that because if you don't have any evidence becky i'd like you to take that negative thought and replace it with a positive one. And in this way, you can train your brain. And I've done it. And it does actually work because your brain, unless you're suffering from some terrible neurological condition, generally does what you tell it to. It's an organ. So that's one thing that I've learned that has been really helpful to me. And another thing that I think has been really helpful is that failure can be treated as data acquisition

so instead of thinking of failure as a sort of life-defining awful occurrence that means you're a failure as a person maybe the better way of thinking of it is that it's taking you closer to the thing that is for you so it's identifying the thing that isn't for you and it's giving you valuable information about the thing that is for you. So it's identifying the thing that isn't for you. And it's giving you valuable information about the thing that might be. Yeah, and that failure isn't something in

isolation, it's kind of sits in a circle with success. 100% I see them as flip sides of the same coin. You can't fully appreciate, understand or attain success unless you've dealt with failure in the same way that you need a context for happiness. Like you'll only feel truly happy if you've also felt truly sad is my belief anyway. I love that. And that's what Mo said, isn't it? Is that you, are you going to, do you look at something, for example, like his son's death as a failure because he sort of feels in a way he failed as a father? Do you look at it as a success because he's gone on to share, I think you said so far with 47 million people more happiness and his goal is a billion is it both or is it just part of life's adventure and is it almost

kind of none of the above as a result it's just part of your everyday learning exactly he said this really beautiful thing to me about how he used to wake up in the weeks and months after Ali died and his first thought was the crushing grief of he died. And then after a while, he thought, I'm going to switch that and instead choose to think, yes, he died, but he also lived. And it's the same thought, but just expressed differently. Do you think with failure, one of the things is just almost like it's reframing the way we think about it and reframing the way that we talk about it because the word itself is so negative.

But as you said, it can give you so much, but it sounds so finite. And it has this sense that you kind of like quit now. And I remember, you know, from a kind of business perspective, a digital seller's perspective, one of our biggest failures and probably by quite a long way, our biggest failure was when, you know,

initially we started, we did three different things. we had the kind of traditional dishes yellow side like this and and the books and all our social media and we had our products business and we opened three sites we opened three delis and you know we got in over our head we had too many commitments and we just thought there's no way we can do all three and we decided to close two of them and there was horrible press around it and it was, you know, they're failing and they're going out of business and people secretly kind of reveling in that, which was a really bizarre and interesting kind of understanding. But I remember you said it and you said afterwards, the biggest learning was like, if you're going to fail, fail quickly, you know, just do it. Yeah, fail fast. Exactly. And,

you know, make the decision to change something in your life or to, you know, let something go. But do it quickly and kind of move on to the next thing. And I wonder if venture capitalists in Silicon Valley who will not invest in a startup company unless the person starting it up has failed at least twice before with a business, because they know that that person will have learned and acquired necessary information and knowledge from the first two failures. And I think that that kind of narrative is what we need to bring into our broader discussion about failure, is attaching less of a personal definition to it, as in, you can fail, but it does not make you as a person a failure. It is something that's going to happen to all of us. And once you accept that, it's actually a very liberating and democratizing thought, because it connects us all rather than

alienates us. And I think that we're all so busy in this age of constant comparison. I mean, you touched on it there in terms of the, I can't even imagine the press that you get. But in terms of Instagram and scrolling through everyone else's social media feeds, we're so busy trying to pretend that we have perfect lives, that it can feel as if the space for noble failure has been squeezed out of us. And I just want to open up that space a bit more and let the oxygen come in. And that's not, I'm not saying that we don't need to try. I still think you need to try really hard at whatever it is that you want to do. But

if having tried your best, you are failing or there is a failure in your path for whatever reason then you can know that you've done what you you could and that failure is therefore teaching you something so often for me a failure is a lesson wrapped up in a mistake so in your book you've got how to fail at all kinds of things like 20s relationships dating um tests etc but there was one chapter that I feel like obviously given the fact that we work in the health and wellness space we have to talk about how to fail at being Gwyneth Paltrow um it really made me laugh there's actually quite a kind of very honest and kind of important message in there about body image which is obviously I think really tied into that world of comparison that you're talking about and I'd love to hear more about it you also spent a week trying to be Gwyneth Paltrow in LA yeah that makes me sound really weird I was commissioned by

a Sunday newspaper to spend life as Gwyneth Paltrow for a week which is a dream commission and I was in LA at the time I was living there so I was able to do it quite easily and it was really fun and really funny so some of the things I did during that week were I had my vagina steamed that made me laugh so much reading about that that didn't sound like the most enjoyable no that was actually the least enjoyable element of being Gwyneth Paltrow because it just ends up giving you clammy nether regions that was my experience of it but I also ate macrobiotic food I had a sound bath the sound bath was amazing I bath was amazing. I had an infrared sauna. I had some kind of facial treatment that she had. And I went to a Tracy Anderson masterclass, which was really difficult,

a bit of a nightmare. But at the end of that week, I realized that being Gwyneth Paltrow is a full time job in itself. And you need disposable income, a lot of it. I think your facial is $2,000. Yes, exactly. And I got it as a press freebie, because I'm extremely lucky that my job enables me to do things like that. So I have my own kind of privilege that I bring to it. But it made me realize that Gwyneth Paltrow, as wonderful as I'm sure she is, but in our culture, what she's come to represent is a lifestyle that I feel pretends to be accessible to the normal person. And actually, it isn't because you need a personal microbiotics chef and you need to spend thousands of dollars on

face treatments and preferably you need to live in LA. And what I was exploring in that chapter was the tension between those two things. Because our culture now, the relationship we have with celebrities is so disintermediated because we can see them on Instagram and they invite us into their lives. Whereas in the past, there was this very kind of rigorous studio system which had its own negativity attached to it.

But the whole point of stars was that they were unobtainable and pursuing unobtainable lives. Whereas now there's just so much pressure to be like Gwyneth Paltrow or whoever, and also to like be nailing your career, have your children, live in a nice house, pay your rent, have a great friendship group and just live a life in that respect as well. And it's exhausting. And that's basically what I say, end up saying in that chapter. But I'm glad you picked on that

chapter because it was very personal to me, chapter and I'm often asked about the how to fail at babies segment of the book which I'm really glad to be asked about and really glad to talk about but that the chapter about failing to be Queen of the Paltrow was about my relationship with my own body as well and how I'm very lucky and very grateful that I've never had an eating disorder I know people very close to me who have had and continue to have. And I know how difficult that is. But I did have a whole period in my late 20s, early 30s, where I felt I think that my life was spiraling out of control. And one of the things that I could control were the things I ate. And so I took healthy eating to an extreme. And I would

only allow myself to eat one salad a day of like chickpeas, cucumber and tomato, which by the way is delicious and I still eat it. But it was very kind of rigorous. I was very, my thinking about food was very strained and kind of unhappy. And I wanted to share that because I think, again, a lot of women possibly have phases like that in their lives. And I'm very glad I'm out of it now because I'm happier and Emily Sandé speaks so beautifully in her episode with you about that as well and if so if that is a kind of challenge for anyone that is a really interesting episode to listen to because she was saying the exact same thing of going through a divorce

and what started off as something really healthy and working out and eating well became became something difficult I think again it's such an important thing to be honest about because it's something that lots of people feel like they're failing at because, as you said, life's so busy and you're trying to do your job and get to the gym and look after your kids and see your friends and have all these different hobbies and you're going to meditate and you're going to walk 10,000 steps. And it's like you need three days in one day just to be able to even consider completing that list. Exactly. And it feels like everything is measured. So you always feel like it's built in that you're going to feel like you're failing because your Fitbit is measuring your steps. Like everything

you do is kind of an act of measurement. And I feel, I fear that we've forgotten how to do it just for the joy of it. But my thing, a bit like Emily Sunday, getting out of that phase of my life was a lot for me about discovering, I was about to say rediscovering, but I think it was discovering for the first time that I quite liked exercise. Because at school, I was rubbish at competitive sports, and I hated team sports. And I therefore in my head, thought that I just didn't like working out. And what I discovered when my marriage ended, and when I failed with IVF was that I needed to reclaim my own body. And that's when I started really liking stuff like yoga or the odd spin class.

I went through a running phase, things like that. It was really important for me to get out of my head and back into my body and for me to value it and respect it for what it could do rather than what it couldn't. So we were talking about this last night about the episode. And I was asking Matt what his biggest failures were, because we all have had so many failures in our life. And if you were going to pick three, it's quite indicative of what matters the most, isn't it? Yes, it is. And it's also indicative, I think, because I'm just thinking because the last episode of the first season of my podcast, I was interviewed by Dolly Alderson. So we flipped the tables. And I chose my three failures.

Two of them were really serious. And one of them was lighthearted. And I think I was trying to be like, I wanted to be deep, but I also wanted to be funny. So it's also indicative of the kind of person you're trying to be, which is super interesting. So will you just let all our listeners know what your three were? Yes, they were a failure to say goodbye I struggle with deep goodbyes partly because I had a boyfriend who was killed in Iraq and I've never really got over the shock of that and then the second failure was

failing to have babies and then the third failure was failure to be good at tennis so that was like which I'm actually not over the fact that I'm not good at tennis. It's outrageous, but that was one of them. So what would you pick as yours? So I was thinking about this last night. So I suppose I was lucky in many ways because I have a bit of an unusual background, but I grew up playing golf. So from the age of three, I dreamed of being a professional golfer.

Tiger Woods is Matt's like number one idol. And so if you're a professional, so I got to a level where I could be a professional golfer and tiger woods is matt's like number one idol um and so if you're a professional so i got to a level where i could be a professional golfer and i played on what's called the challenge tour in europe for four years um so i got to travel the world and and it was absolutely great and one of the great things about golf is that it really does prep you for failure in life because even the best golfers in the world only win maybe one or two percent of their time tiger woods is an anomaly where he won where he was winning kind of up to 20 25 percent of their time but as a golfer and a professional sportsman you definitely need to get used to failure because it becomes a part of your of your kind of every day and so i had to make a really difficult decision when i was 26 of um you know i was still doing fine I was making my way but I decided that you know I was

never going to be a top 25 or top 50 player in the world and so I decided to stop playing and and get a real job and it was a real kind of change in identity for me because I spent my whole life playing golf and my friends were golfers and they were all still continuing with their careers to play and I decided to stop and it really was a kind of it was a left right moment um in my life and something where I did almost had to kind of discover who that new person was so I think that was that was definitely one I think the other one professionally definitely was as Ella said and alluded to we when we started out as a business we had a pretty wide funnel of what we did and we wanted to have hospitality we wanted to have our sites and then we wanted to continue the activities that ella was doing

before i got involved and then we also wanted to have our products business and we got to a point where our products business was going very well and our delis because they didn't we weren't giving them the attention they hadn't grown as quickly as we wanted them to that we decided to shut them down and it was kind of humiliating because you're you know i was ella's husband i was delicious yellow had only ever ridden this amazing wave up until um that point and so suddenly you know one of the first ventures we've done and you're shutting down two sites and you know it it made sense there was ways that we felt that if we had kept going with it when we had changed a couple things what it really needed actually was was more sites that we could have fixed it but it was still it was a it was a big moment and

definitely something where i learned an enormous amount from it and i'm so genuinely glad that it happened now because it's you know our food products business and our app now are doing so well and and so much of what happened in the delis has enabled all of that other growth to happen and i'm genuinely thankful for it and then i suppose the only the the other fate i was talking about and i'm not sure if it's if it's a failure as such but my mom passed away um in the middle of last year and my mom had a rare brain cancer and we literally did everything in the world we could to help her and we were talking to the absolute best doctors in the world all over the place and ultimately we couldn't help her and if love could have kept her alive then you know she would have

lived for forever but we failed in ultimately in being able to keep her and you know she was she basically she was in about 36 hours before she died she had a huge hemorrhage in her brain and she couldn't she was effectively in a coma but in the last 20 seconds of her life her eyes suddenly her eyes had been shut and her eyes suddenly opened you could see the crystal clear blue of her eyes and it was just the most she was lying in my arms um god i was so sorry oh my god i'm getting like so beautiful and she was lying in my arms um yeah when she died and seeing the pureness of her of the expression in her face was something that absolutely has propelled me into a new different type of perspective and because she had lived such a good life of helping other people

and it was all of that goodness and that she had had throughout her life that enabled her to be completely calm and content in that second of complete uncertainty for her as she was going on to a place that she didn't know exactly where she was going and it changed something in me that I know now gives me a new level of gratitude and focus each day to be the best husband I can be to be now be the best father I can be to Sky you know we had always kind of slightly put off having kids because everything was too busy and we were like you know we'll do it next year when something's calmed down a bit in the business and you know when after mum died we were like actually no let's get on with our lives let's do this now having Sky is unquestionably the best thing that has ever happened to me by a million miles and it was from

i think this failure in many ways that we had from not being able to help mum that has now transplanted me into this into this new place where i i genuinely feel that I'm more content, I'm more settled, I'm more focused, I'm more kind of disciplined in what I do and I think I'm a better person, I'm a better husband, father, friend now than I ever was. And I think it just shows how out of the thing that is the worst thing you think has ever happened in your life

can actually take you to the best place you've ever been that's just so amazing but it's true it's been such an amazing learning i think it's exactly what you get from talking about it is that failure is never ever finite like there's nothing that any of us messed up we were talking about it again like one of my biggest failings was when I got sick I wouldn't tell anyone about it I just sat on my own I was incredibly depressed I made everything so much worse I felt you know as kind of dark as I could imagine you can get and and then I started to see Ella and it's ended up here and we met through it and you know you just think like this moment that I thought I was failing at like my body was failing I was failing as just general human being because I

didn't want to talk to anyone I wasn't particularly nice to anyone I did talk to because I felt so uncomfortable so kind of shy and awkward that I'd sort of push people away I was just you know failing at school because my grades were then terrible I was just failing at everything and then suddenly it takes you into somewhere that you never thought you could get to. It really is so important. And so much of everything in life is only about celebrating successes.

And it feels like a success is, one, it's a relative thing and it's a subjective thing, but it also can often just be a moment in time. And actually our lives are made up of lots of little successes and failures every single day. And I think that there is such a focus on this absolute that I think is so important for us to try and move away from. And I know that reading your work and listening to your work

has also had a profound effect on us too. Oh, thank you so much. I'm very fond of saying that life is texture and it would be very boring if it was just one note. And we're here to experience, as you say, all the ups and downs and all the little wriggles and all the things that we think we'd want to iron out, but actually they just make us so much more human.

I've definitely felt more and more that it's also about like trying not to focus too much on it. Obviously you have the big moments, but on the day to day and like the last few weeks have been such a lesson for that. Like, you know, it's such a kind of boring like mum thing to say, but when I went back to work a few weeks ago, I've been too busy. I stopped making as much milk as I would want for Sky. And yesterday, you know, I like had pumped for about four hours

and I got zero meals in 40 minutes. And I called Matt crying, you know I like had pumped for about four hours and I got zero mils in 40 minutes and I called Matt crying you know I'm a terrible mom you know I've put this first or I've not been doing this and and then four hours later you get 100 mils and you just think god I cried and I cried and I thought I was so rubbish and then four hours later I think I'm absolutely smashing life again and it's so true and um you know my sister just does a new job and she was really struggling with something and this morning you should have spoken to them about it feeling so much better and it's just such a good example that I think we can get so hit up there is so much pressure on everyone this today as you said like we see everyone else's lives we feel like we need to succeed in everything we do and we do so much

now and we do everything to such an extreme extent it feels like and we can get so het up and being useless at something and thinking that we're failing at it and two days later we think that we're absolutely winning at it and it makes us a bit crazy yeah exactly well it's that thing that most us like that's just the same thing's happening but you're just switching how you're thinking about it have you learned something that you think is the best whether it's a tool or it's a practice that people can do in that moment of failure that will be the best transporter onto success or into a better place than where they are in that moment? I think the thing that I've learned is that I'm not ridiculously Pollyanna-ish about it. I

understand that if a failure happens, I mean, you just spoke so extraordinarily, Matthew, about like the one of the most awful things that could happen to someone. You can't just bounce back from that. There has to be a period of grieving and coming to terms with whatever you've just experienced. And that's fine. So I think a lot of people panic when they're in the grip of that, that they're not bouncing back quickly enough because now we've got to do everything. We've even got to do failure perfectly. Even if you've just broken up with someone and you're heartbroken,

I would say give yourself time to come to terms with that. Give yourself however long it takes, weeks, months, and that's fine. Because at the same moment as you're feeling sadness and you're facing that, and you're dealing with your emotions, you're also getting over it and getting stronger, or you're coming to terms with it and getting stronger because you're being honest with yourself about the emotions. So I think that's really important. And then once you're ready, I would suggest trying to observe the thing that's happened rather than trying to

define yourself by how you're feeling. Because your emotions are absolutely real. But sometimes they play tricks on you and tell you that you're the one at fault. And actually, I think you need to be more Mo Gowdat and just say, how much of this is my brain telling me an old narrative that is about how I'm useless, and people have told me I'm not good enough and how much is it something that I really need to address in my life and what has this thing sought to teach me. So in my own context that breakup that I mentioned at the very beginning of this interview which ultimately led to the creation of How to Fail, it took me six weeks to

get over that and I actually googled how long does it take to go over heartbreak because I was so devastated. Because I think I was dealing with a lot of grief, not just that relationship, but my divorce, my 30s were coming to an end, all of that. Then I realized that one of the things it had taught me was that I am very good at telling stories, not just about who I am to myself, but about how other people are and who they are. And when I was in a romantic relationship, the danger was that I would tell the most wonderful story about the other person,

and I would forget to look at who they really were and to listen to the information they were actually giving me because I was creating this romantic narrative in my head where everything would come good in the end. And that has been an extremely important lesson for me and it means that I'm now in a much much healthier relationship because I see things hopefully as they are and I feel able to communicate that so that sense of honesty basically with yourself is kind of absolutely paramount exactly yes and it's not I think I was always scared of being that honest,

scared of seeing things for how they really were, and ultimately very scared that I wouldn't be enough if I were being honest about myself. And the opposite has turned out to be true, that in being honest about myself, the best things in my life have happened. And vulnerability, I think, is one of the most biggest shows of strength you can have as well it was one of the first things you'd always say

to me though because i was so useless that it was you've got to be honest with yourself like about anything and everything and it's really hard to do but as soon as you started doing it so much happier because you were acknowledging the things that you were getting wrong even sometimes you'd have an argument and you know a disagreement and you think you know I don't think I'm being completely honest about this you know I think you probably are right totally and it's like and even with my boyfriend now genuinely I will say to him please can you give me some compliments and it saves so much time I'm like this is what I need I know it's vaguely ridiculous but if you could do it that will just make me feel so much better and then we can move on he's like of course and then he can do and it does the same thing i do the

exact same thing i love doing that yeah and i'm like do you know what today i just need to just be really nice to me i have a little speech about the fact that you two definitely love me um so yeah if anyone else is listening they ask for that you are not alone um but it's so true and it is it's just being honest rather than kind of poking the person and prodding them until they get kind of frustrated, because all you're asking them to do is something that they're probably not about to do. And if you just ask for it, exactly magic, I get very affected by arguments. I hate conflict. It's awful. And it can completely throw me off for at least a day. And I think that one of the things that I find really helpful is that every argument will take you closer to authenticity. It will either make you closer to the person that you're having the argument with because you would have learned something about them.

Or it will take you closer to who you really are. That is so wise. And so true as well. And arguments can either become destructive or they can become really constructive. Yeah. I think that's so wise. That ends so true as well. And arguments can either become destructive or they can become really constructive. Yeah. I think that's so right. And the other thing that I always say is if you've broken up with someone or someone's broken up with you, I guarantee you that they're not the right person for you. Because if they were the right person, they would be with you.

Yeah. And that can sometimes sound harsh, but I don't mean it harshly. I mean it lovingly. That actually it's really good that that person is now out of your life and out of the way so that the path can be clear for the person or the life or the future that is for you. The way we end each episode is to ask our guests their three top tips for whatever the subject that we've been talking about. What would you say are your three top tips for failure and dealing with failure? My three top tips are the first one is failure just is.

It happens to everyone. It's what connects us. And just because you fail does not make you yourself a failure. The second one is that you exist separately from your negative thoughts. So you are not your brain. If your brain is telling you a story of anxiety and a story of how hopeless you are, your brain is not telling you fact. You can actually retrain your brain to think of failure in a more positive way. As a failure being a nudge from the universe in a different direction and

taking you closer to the thing that is for you and further away from the thing that isn't and the third one is really what we've been talking about that vulnerability is your superpower paradoxically it is when you are willing to be vulnerable and authentic and honest and true that you find the greatest steps of your strength because on that just no one's perfect and that's what i've learned from you basically well thank you i think but it's true can i just give one really amazing example of that actually and this is um it's in a kind of slightly different context we talked about but a few years ago the agency that represents Ella and Deliciously Ella have this

big retreat at the start of each year and they invite all of their employees and a lot of their clients to come and we went to this event it was down in Southern California and the CEO who is this larger than life character he's actually who Ari is gold is based on in entourage and he basically stood up in front of all of these people and he's the CEO of the business and he talked about how over the Christmas break him and his wife finally decided to get divorced after like 20 years of marriage and with their kids and he started crying on stage and it was one of the most powerful examples I've ever seen of leadership. Because what he showed is that within that organization, you can be completely open about

who you are. And in being open, you're probably also then going to get the best from people in the way they work as well. And it was just this completely overpowering example of what real leadership was about and how what strength there is in vulnerability too so I completely agree I love that it's a brilliant example that was such a powerful moment and it's exactly what you get from listening to podcasts is you have you know all these offensively successful people you know like um the one you did recently with Phoebe Waller-Bridge like you can't move but for listening a moment about how successful she is and there she is saying the show that made her so successful was rejected so many times,

and she failed so many times until the last moment. And you just listen to success after success. It is so normal. Well, that's just to pick up on that, actually, because one of the criticisms that I sometimes get about the podcast is, is I interview highly successful people. And the subtext is, what on earth would they know about failure? And there's no doubt that I interview highly successful people. And the subtext is, well, what on earth would they know about failure? And there's no doubt that I also come from a position of extreme privilege. Like I'm white, middle-class, I own a laptop. I'm in the top 1% of the global population.

But the reason that I have the guests that I have on the podcast, and I loved the way you put it, Ella. They're people you look up to. They're not actually all famous, but they're people from different walks of life who have had success in some measure. But the reason that I have those people is because they are able to analyse with hindsight where things went wrong and what they got from them.

And if I were to interview someone in the grip of current failure, I don't think personally that that would be particularly ethical. And I also don't think that someone would, in the grip of failure, have that ability to assess what they were learning from it, if anything. And so it is actually designed absolutely, as you say, to be kind of aspirational and democratic and feel connected and authentic. But the thing that it does for me, which is so powerful, is it takes away the issue of comparison, which exists so strongly in our current society because we do have that kind of slightly tricky access to everyone and we feel like they're succeeding and they're succeeding and we are so rubbish because we can see everything that they're

doing and then you realize that they are human too yeah and there's something really beautiful and powerful and profound in realizing that no matter how amazing someone is and how much you look up to them they are not perfect nobody is perfect it is impossible yeah please will you come on my podcast yeah okay with pleasure well thank you so so much this has been amazing I've loved it thank you both and do honestly go listen to boggers but please go and listen to mo on it because it will change your life. Thanks so much for listening, guys. We'll be back again next Tuesday. Next Tuesday, we're actually going to be talking

about something completely different. We're going to be talking about birth and on the title of a book, Give Birth Like a Feminist. It's a pretty interesting topic. Really looking forward to it. And we will see you then. You're a podcast listener. Thanks, guys. offering host endorsements, or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads.

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