The invitation
I was recently invited to present at a large conference on the topic of Resilience – Learnings Taken from Failure. I found this an intensely humbling activity to prepare for.
I have enjoyed the echo chamber of personal reflection, grappling with my own perceptions of success and failure rather than airing laundry for others to pick apart. I was – perhaps understandably – reluctant to enable the weighted chain of failed expectations to be slung around my neck by those who would be in attendance.
Whilst preparing, I found myself reflecting on why mistakes feature so heavily in tales of accelerated development. A coach recently described himself not as the sum of his successes, but of his failures and I found myself nodding.
There is a gravitational pull to stories of personal development and import. They are simply far more memorable and can be recalled more vividly than those another’s success. This was – I imagined – the reason I had been invited to speak after all: to share with entrepreneurs the good, the bad and the terrifying of the journey they were about to walk.
The key take-out needed to be about resilience: the antidote to the feeling of overwhelming failure.
Failure is not final
The first lesson in resilience is to realise – and hold to the reality – that failure is not fatal. There is no dishonour in taking an audacious swing for the fences and missing the ball. High rewards require that high risk be taken, and investing oneself into this paradigm of living– rather than tethering to an outcome – is critical.
Resilience is the ability to withstand or recover from setbacks, and reminding myself of the inherent goodness of the journey helped overcome disappointment at my start-ups final destination. Practically, this means that one’s life must at all times consist of more than a single pursuit. One’s identity cannot be wrapped entirely up in a single, unsure outcome. We must be bigger than any single point of failure, at all times. This allows a singular failure in one of life’s strands to be but part of your life’s rope.
Resilience comes from an objective beyond the outcome
The second point to make on resilience is it can only be accessed when the objective striven towards is greater than the outcome. It is easier to recover from a close by not quite goal or milestone when the greater good – and your own happiness – was advanced by your very efforts.
To borrow from Dan Pink’s Drive, this speaks to our internal, intrinsic motivation: a blend of autonomy, mastery and purpose.
In pursuit of any objective, work can be objectively enjoyed and relished with an absence of top-down control, allowing for the how of problem solving to be determined by the person doing the work. This was a big tick for HouseME in how we went about solving the problem of unfair discrimination in residential renting. We had a blank canvas as to how to solve the problem, and it meant each day was an adventure and a learning curve.
Mastery is the asymptotic pursuit of excellence. It is akin to the state of flow in work: an objective beyond the outcome of the activity. Nobody every masters anything perfectly. But falling short of a perfect score doesn’t mean you can’t win the competition, become a tennis champion or advance a cause. We were better for trying, better for building and better for learning from our mistakes, day by day.
Purpose: aligning your own outcomes to that of a greater objective or cause. If what you attempt is both personally stimulating and altruistic, there is an endless abundance of motivation to persevere, bounce back from setbacks and keep going. Staying focused on the problem, not your solution, is key.
Resilience can be built by making peace with the future.
Finally, consider that being resilient is quintessentially stoic. It allows for the embrace of negative emotions and experiences, and reframes them as opportunities for growth, detached from outcomes and dealt with elegantly – perhaps even in advance.
It reminded me of my reflections midway through the HouseME journey. To continue would mean the certainty of one of two outcomes. I needed to be comfortable with both in order to achieve either.
Every founder has imagined living out his worst fear times beyond counting, and for years before anything remotely as catastrophic finally does take place. Indeed, it is foolish to start a business without being comfortable that your worst-case outcome is highly likely.
But this is the strength of the entrepreneur: if he makes peace with whatever the worst may be and is prepared to face it, then no eventuality has the power to scare him from his pursuit of the dream. He can use this strength to get up and go again. – The First Kudu
Being at peace with events outside of your control by focusing on how one reacts is the third practical principle of resilience.
The Q&A
Anticipatory nervousness can be a stimulant, and the opportunity to engage, share and be vulnerable was helpful to attendees (I was told – thanks for the feedback!). The most interesting question posed to me was how best one should deal with mental health challenges, and in retrospect I only provided a partial answer in that we can’t maintain an expectation of balance on a daily basis.
To more fully articulate that stance, consider that balance is an illusion at any point of time. It can only be viewed backwards, better understood as an income statement rather than a balance sheet. A pendulum, rather than a chronometer. And your health, a critical part of healthy balance, is therefore a component that at certain times in your life will ebb rather than flow. To my mind it is both acceptable and reasonable to expect this in pursuit of other ambitions, as we have finite capacity in both hours and energy in a day.
For some, achieving balance might translate into a strong strand of physical health. For others, family or friends become their rope’s strongest strand. But balance is found in the interweaving of all chosen activities into a form most capable of tensile strength.
Living this way builds resilience sufficient to ensure that no failure is ever fatal. No strand is every the majority of the rope.