Failosophy

Dedication

For Justin, who never fails me

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Introduction

7  What Is Failure?

8  The Seven Failure Principles

9  Conclusion

10  Addendum: A Catalogue of Failure

11  Also by Elizabeth Day

12  About the Author

13  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Introduction

Every day since 13 July 2018, I have thought about failure. My own and other people’s. The failures that define us and the ones that seem stupid in hindsight. Everything from failed marriages to failed driving tests.

I can name the date so precisely because that is the day on which I launched a podcast called How To Fail. In fact, it was called How To Fail With Elizabeth Day because with near-perfect comic timing, I had failed to name it properly, having earlier failed to do my research, which would have uncovered another podcast already in existence called almost the same thing.

Blissfully unaware of this fact, I drew my logo with felt-tip pens one night, tracing around the bottom of my favourite mug to draw a rosette badge. I wrote the title in my own handwriting, haphazardly colouring it in with pink highlighter. I sold the wedding dress from my failed marriage on eBay to fund the first few episodes. At first, it failed to attract any bids so I slashed the price and then, when someone bought it, I wrapped it up in a bulky package and took it to the post office feeling a sense of release as I did so. My marriage might have failed, but at least one good thing had come out of it.

Having failed to find an original name, failed to get the desired price for the wedding dress and failed to hire a graphic designer to produce a more professional logo, I was all set for the failure of the podcast itself. I didn’t expect How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, or the subsequent memoir that came out of it, to be the most successful thing I have ever done, but that’s how it turned out.

Never let it be said that the universe doesn’t have a sense of irony.

At the time of writing, the podcast has been going for 18 months and is well into its seventh season. It has attracted many millions of downloads despite, or perhaps because of, its relatively simple concept. Each week, I ask my guest to come up with three ‘failures’ in advance of the recording. These can be sublime or ridiculous; profound or superficial. The only criteria are that the guest must feel comfortable talking about the subjects they’ve chosen, and that they are able to reflect on what they have learned from them.

The idea is to make listeners who are scared of failure in their own lives feel less alone, and also to reassure them that there might be hope on the other side. It was based on the premise that learning how we fail actually means learning how to succeed better. Most failures can teach us something meaningful about ourselves if we choose to listen and, besides, success tastes all the sweeter if you’ve fought for it.

The people I’ve spoken to have told me about their family dysfunction, their mental health issues and the grief they have grappled with after profound loss – a son who died during a routine operation at the age of 21; a baby lost to miscarriage; 10 years lost to the grip of heroin addiction. I, too, have examined my own failures both professional and personal, failures of faith and intimacy, and sometimes just a failure of self-belief that repeated itself on what seemed like an automatic spin cycle until the world shuddered to a halt and I was confronted with who I actually was as opposed to the blameless, pleasant, undemanding projection of the perfect person I’d tried so hard to be.

Alongside this, I have thought about the failure of my marriage; my failure to have children; my failure to realise that a desire to people-please was making me desperately unhappy; my failure to resolve things with an ex-boyfriend who was killed six months after we broke up; my failure to express my own anger, instead masking it with a more socially acceptable sadness; and my failure to remove myself from toxic relationships until it was a question of survival.

All these failures have been an integral part of my life. All these failures have been part of my growth. Life is texture. Experiencing all facets of existence – the good and the bad – enables us to appreciate them fully. I feel lucky in my current relationship not only because I have met a wonderful person, but also because I have so much experience of dysfunctional relationships with not-so-wonderful people to compare it to.

‘The darker the night,’ Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘the brighter the stars.’

Being at peace with failure means I have very few regrets. Each time something has gone wrong, it has led me to where I am meant to be, which is right here, right now, writing this introduction. I firmly cling to the belief that the universe is unfolding exactly as is intended and that although we, as imperfect humans, can’t hope to understand it all at the time, life will generally teach us the lessons we need to learn if we are open to the possibility.

Some people might think that sounds a bit woo-woo. I call it faith. It doesn’t have to be faith in a particular god or an organised religion. It can be faith for its own sake: the decision to believe that things will be OK; that this too shall pass.

I have thought about more trivial failures, too. The notable and mortifying occasion, as a seven-year-old on the way to the zoo, that my knickers slipped onto the pavement underneath my skirt because of their loose elastic. There was the first date I went on with my now-boyfriend where, introductions done, I sat down, removed my coat and promptly fell off my chair in full view of everyone in the trendy open-plan bar.

Then there’s my failure to understand Excel spreadsheets or make PowerPoint presentations. My failure to comprehend tax or the American voting system or the offside rule no matter how many times someone explains it. My failure to have read War and Peace and my repeated failure to find nature documentaries as interesting as everyone else does. My failure to like spicy food or to be able to dive into a swimming pool, despite every single one of my exes insisting they would be the one to teach me to do both.

I understand that thinking about failure this much makes me something of an oddball. Many people try not to dwell on the times in their life when things went wrong or when they made avoidable mistakes or the universe dealt them a really rubbish hand. The second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of the positive psychology movement, prompted by the publication in 1952 of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (sample quote: ‘Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities!’) and when this merged with the later trend towards self-help, we found ourselves constantly being encouraged to think good thoughts and not indulge the negative, which was, we were confidently informed, holding us back from reaching our full potential. We were told that we needed to start each day with an affirmation spoken directly into the mirror, in the manner of Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver, except less psychopathic. In return, we were promised wealth, influence, happiness and true love. It turned out that all we had to do was put together an upbeat mood board and success would manifest itself.

It’s not that I don’t have sympathy with aspects of the positive-thinking movement. I do. You can, for instance, train your brain to be happier (and a portion of this book will be dedicated to telling you how). Being optimistic can indeed give you the impetus you need to do things you might otherwise fear. It’s just that all of this requires substantially more effort than talking to yourself in the mirror or collating pseudo-philosophical quotes on Pinterest. Our mental muscles require just as much working out as our physical ones.

The knock-on effect of ‘positivity’ has been to marginalise failure, as if negativity is as contagious as leprosy; as if to think about it too much means we’re consigning ourselves to forever picking over the bones of the past like depressed hyenas.

In our modern age, we are bombarded with success stories to such an extent that we are in danger of believing exceptionalism is the norm. Logically, it can’t be so. An exception is an exception precisely because it lies outside the average. And yet we live in an age of curated perfection, where social media encourages us to believe we are all celebrities in our own lives. We are led to think that we deserve success and will be rewarded with it if only we are clever enough or thin enough or tanned enough or famous enough or charitable enough or sociable enough or, in some way, good enough.

At the same time, our omnipresent online culture has scared us into believing that any failure will be humiliatingly public. Send out an ill-thought-through Tweet one day and you could become a viral internet sensation the next for all the wrong reasons. As a result, we have become more averse to risk or experimentation, for fear that any failure will make us seem less than perfect and that our mistakes will be played out in front of a circus of online critics, booing and hissing from behind their toxic avatars.

How can we be happy in this scenario? It is not enough just to think it into being. We have been taught to pursue happiness as the ultimate goal. But happiness is, by necessity, transient. It can only be fully appreciated in opposition to other, darker emotions. Living in a constant state of peak happiness would be exhausting – a bit like perpetually being on the fastest bit of a rollercoaster. It might be fun, but it’s high-octane and unpredictable and, by the end of it, your hair looks really bad. What if the worthier goal is the quieter, less glamorous contentment? What if, instead, we sought to nurture an acceptance that difficult things will happen as well as great things and that there is much to be learned from experiencing both? Of course, that thinking process requires effort and practice. It doesn’t just happen. But this book will offer you ways of incorporating it into your daily routines.

So, yes, I have spent a large portion of the last couple of years thinking incessantly about failure, and the weird thing is that it hasn’t been a negative experience. On the contrary, I feel stronger, happier and more empowered as a result. I’m no longer embarrassed by my mistakes because when I look back at the biggest moments of crisis in my life, I now feel proud of my resilience in surviving them. They have made me who I am, but they do not define me.

If we learn about our past, and ask what it is trying to teach us, then we are no longer condemned to repeat it. Embracing failure is embracing growth. Failure happens to us all, even those celebrity success stories who appear like shimmering modern gods on the red carpet and who seem to have everything sorted.

Failure does not see status – although, admittedly, wealth and privilege make some failures conspicuously easier to bear. But on the whole, it is a democratising force – and that’s curiously liberating. If you know something is going to happen, then why spend your life trying to avoid it? Why not accept the fact of failure and endeavour to turn it to your advantage where possible? And why not discuss it? The only way to tackle taboos is to talk about them. Our antidote to shame is shared experience, which is why we should all be more open when things go wrong. When you destigmatise failure, it loses its power to harm you.

That’s where Failosophy comes in.

Failosophy brings together all the lessons I’ve learned from my own life, from hosting the podcast and interviewing a series of brilliant, stimulating people and from meeting many wonderful readers and listeners who have been kind enough to share their stories with me. I have distilled all this precious material into seven key principles of failure. These are not exhaustive, nor will every single one hold equal resonance for everyone’s personal situation. The principles are intended as helpful guides through life’s rough patches. Consider them the equivalent of having a chat with a good friend who wants to make you feel better. The advice is practical but, I hope, inspirational too. There are carefully selected quotes from my guests who have insights into everything from failed exams and romantic break-ups to how to cope with severe anxiety. You will meet Malcolm Gladwell, Alain de Botton, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lemn Sissay, Nigel Slater, Emeli Sandé, Meera Syal, Dame Kelly Holmes, Andrew Scott and many, many more within these pages. You will hear from footballers, psychotherapists, politicians, pop stars, chefs and former reality TV contestants.

There are some caveats. Firstly, it’s important to state that I am not fetishising failure. Nor am I suggesting you actively pursue it, pinning evidence of your terrible decisions proudly to your chest like war medals. I’m an advocate of trying your hardest at any given task but, if having tried your best, you still fail, my point is that this does not, in itself, mean that the failure has to be life-defining. However difficult it might seem at the time, it is possible to learn something necessary as a result of most failures.

Secondly, I am not claiming that my way works for everyone. You must feel free to do whatever you want with your failures! If that means sitting with a failure, not wanting to take any sort of positives from your experience of it, that’s absolutely fine. It’s simply that I choose a different path. I choose to believe something good can come from almost everything, even if we can’t instantly make out what that positive is. Sometimes, you can only know that with hindsight.

Thirdly, not every failure can be easily assimilated. I am aware that I speak from a position of extreme privilege: I am white, middle-class and have a roof over my head. I cannot write from personal experience about what it is like to be a woman of colour, a marginalised person, someone who is homeless or living with a chronic illness or addiction. But many of my podcast guests can, and that is why I include them here.

Some failures are far more traumatic than others. I’m not saying that we can all bounce back immediately with smiles on our faces at every juncture. There will, in specific instances, be a necessary period of grieving. It’s important to allow that process the time it needs before doing anything else. You don’t have to feel better immediately. There is no such thing as failing at failing. It’s also important to know that there is no hierarchy of distress. If you feel pain, that pain is a fact, whatever the cause of it.

But there is a difference between pain and suffering, between the event and the victimhood. Pain, like failure, happens to us all. We accidentally burn our tongue on a cup of tea that is too hot. There is the immediate pain, which hopefully subsides quite quickly. Then there is the subsequent suffering, which lasts a bit longer as we struggle to taste food for a few days. But imagine beating yourself up about the fact that you’d been stupid enough to burn your tongue for several weeks and months afterwards? That would be prolonging suffering unnecessarily. Instead, you could say to yourself ‘Well, I burned my tongue, but at least I’ll know for the next time to add a bit of cool water to my tea before I drink it.’

That, in a nutshell, is Failosophy. But this book will concern itself with more than just tea, I promise. Read it all in one go, or dip into relevant sections whenever you encounter failure in a specific part of your life. Either way, I hope it might help you to realise that failure does not have to be alienating. In truth, it is the opposite: it connects us all. It makes us human.

What Is Failure?

‘Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what is not’

CARL JUNG, PSYCHOANALYST

What is failure? Great question. It was one I deliberately avoided answering for a while, because it seemed such a hard thing to explain. But eventually the definition I came up with was that failure is what happens when something doesn’t go according to plan. So then you have to start questioning the plan – where did you get it from? Did someone tell you this was the right way to be? Was it an overly critical parent or a judgemental former partner? Is it social conditioning that’s making you believe you’re not at the right place in your life? Is it your own internal critical voice? Or is it that you’ve watched too many 1980s rom-coms and you think that everything has a happy ending, preferably accompanied by an uplifting musical montage? (This isn’t entirely a joke: I realised in my late thirties that my idea of romantic love had mostly come from an intravenous cultural drip of Sleepless in Seattle, Pretty Woman and Working Girl. It wasn’t helpful. They are great films, but they should not be adopted as how-to guides for life unless you want to end up as a secretarial prostitute with a penchant for late-night radio phone-in shows.)

Once you start dismantling the ‘plan’ you had for yourself, you come to realise that the failure to stick to it might not be as wounding as you first imagined. Plans, after all, are an objective solution to a subjective problem: you can’t, with any reliability, plan to be somewhere in five years’ time because you simply don’t know what will happen in those intervening years – and I go into this concept in more detail with Failure Principle number 6: ‘There is no such thing as a future you.’

The problem with my definition of failure is that it doesn’t fully tackle those cataclysmic life events that cannot be easily explained. As I was writing this book, Clemmie, one of my closest friends, had a brain haemorrhage and a massive stroke at the age of 38. Briefly, it looked as though she might not survive. If she did, her family was told, she would be in a dramatically altered state. In defiance of medical expectation, Clemmie not only survived but exceeded every single prediction made of her. She underwent major brain surgery, then had to re-learn how to walk and talk. Her courage and her love of life in this, the most extreme of circumstances, was a privilege to behold.

While she was in a rehabilitation hospital, undergoing strenuous days of back-to-back physical, occupational and speech therapy sessions, there was an outbreak of COVID-19. It rapidly became a global pandemic, affecting us all. Outside visitors were banned from the hospital in order to protect the patients. Across the world, people were dying, cities were going into lockdown and families were putting themselves in self-isolation. Life seemed suddenly to contract. And Clemmie was having to endure the toughest battle of her life without seeing her husband or her two young children.

Shortly after undergoing a cranioplasty to replace half of her skull, Clemmie was diagnosed with COVID-19 too (she was the first patient in the hospital to test positive which, I joked with her, was just typical given her history of over-achievement). So now, as well as having to recover from a stroke and brain surgery, she also had to contend with a life-threatening virus no one really understood. She was ill, exhausted and isolated from her loved ones. Her daily sessions of work continued with the therapists wearing hazmat suits and face masks.

Not once did Clemmie utter a single word of complaint. She told me, time and again, that she had chosen life, and was grateful for having been given that chance. It was extraordinary to see the monumental power of her strength up close. In the end, she was discharged from hospital less than three months after her stroke.

Her husband sent us a photo of the moment he met her, as she walked through the hospital doors unaided, her shaved head making her look like a rock star. She was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Choose Love’.

I read this passage to Clemmie before putting it into the book. She wanted me to make clear that, even now, her recovery is not complete – it’s still difficult for her to shape the right words to express herself, even though she knows exactly what it is she wants to say, and there is still some way to go with her physical therapy. There is, she said, a long road ahead.

I have no doubt that she can do it because, well, it’s her we’re talking about. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed such a display of grace, dignity or courage in the face of a seemingly insurmountable struggle. She never questioned the unfairness of it.

But although Clemmie never asked ‘Why me?’, I know that I did on her behalf. Why her? There was never a satisfactory answer.

It would be impossible to equate these life-altering episodes with, say, a failure to pass an exam. And it would be monstrous to say that there was any sort of mystical explanation for them. The truth is, I don’t know why bad things happen to good people. But I do know that the human spirit has an extraordinary ability to withstand and survive.

I recently went on a promotional tour to Amsterdam, where I was interviewed by a journalist who told me that the Dutch have two words for failure. One is fale, which applies to your common-or-garden variety failures, such as failing a job interview or failing to get into university. The other is pech, which means a failure that is beyond our control, a rupture caused by existential bad luck which is not our fault. It has the same etymological root as the English word ‘pitch’, meaning dark or black – a term that derives from the sticky brown substance left over after the distillation of wood tar or turpentine. Pitch was used in the sixteenth century to waterproof ships. The writer Daniel Defoe used the phrase ‘pitch-dark’ to describe a hurricane in 1704. The concept of pech helps us to understand that failure can also be a state of unexplained darkness, in which it is sometimes difficult to see any crack of light.

For anyone who finds themselves in the grip of that sort of failure, there is little to be done to attack the failure itself. But perhaps we do have the power, however small, to shape our processing of, and our reaction to, times of crisis. Perhaps we can waterproof our sailing ships so that they are better equipped for the next thunderstorm.

That, in any case, is my hope.

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