The failure list

Failure is a concept with multiple facets and definitions depending on whom you ask. A part of Western society promotes a failure-oriented mindset in business and life to develop a tougher skin and learn through adversity. The widespread natural human conceptualization of failure for average people is to recoil from it in fear of negative consequences, losing one’s face within a group or society, or other socio-psychological reasons.

Upon further inspections in the jungle of definition and glorious opinions of how important or irrelevant failure is in humans, one may notice that all of this is human mind-made shenanigans, and failure is a concept that exists only because conceptualized by us at large. And really, failure may not matter as much as we think, because it is a natural part of existence and its inherent wiggleness (irregular course of events unfolding for and within us).

Arthur C. Brooks, who recently published a book on Building a Life You Want and has built an honorable reputation in the public world of self-development and academia for his studies and promulgations of the science of happiness in humans, points to the value of a Failure List (for example in this conversation).

A Failure List is a track record of all the failures you encounter during your life. As Brooks suggests, write about the stories of your failures. Write about them in vivid detail, and set future reminders to revisit the failure story and reflect on how things have turned out. This exercise, Brooks argues, can help you gain perspective on your life, and figure out by yourself that what seems like failure at the outset often turns out to be helpful or valuable events later in life. They can be turning points to positive change, ramps to new positive opportunities, or much-needed change, when looked at in retrospect.

I am not sure how we can define failure and notice it vividly at the moment it arises since the intensity of failure and its degree of clarity in hectic daily life can easily go unnoticed. As a helpful mental model, you may consider failure an event that stirs a significant negative emotion within yourself, characterized by distorted thoughts such as magnification, disassociation, or a strong sense of anger and disappointment. When viewed through the lens of stories, the Failure List reminds me of the Storyworthy moment by Matthew Dicks, where every day, at its end, you reflect on the most story-worthy moment that happened that day, and write about it, developing a wide bank of micro-stories within your life story.

In truth, many of us are living life pressed against its canvas and lamenting for feeling a sense of inadequacy and unsatisfactoriness. When pressed against the canvas, we can’t distinguish the elements of the painting vividly. Our nose is splashed against the veiled paper, and we don’t seem to notice it at all or even bother considering our position toward the canvas. A few centimeters back, and the painting may start to take shape. A few more steps back, and it may start to make sense all along.