How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong. Elizabeth Day

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СКАЧАТЬ I am very good at failing because I think I take risks and I push myself to try new things,’ said the political campaigner Gina Miller. ‘And when you do that, you open yourself up to failure, but it’s a way of really living life … In life we’re all going to fail, and my view is you’ve just got to get used to it. It’s going to happen, so you might as well have a strategy for how you deal with failure, and then once you’ve got that in your back pocket, you can go out in life and really take risks.’

      Most of the men (but by no means all) would respond saying they weren’t sure they had failed and maybe they weren’t quite the right guest for this particular podcast.

      There’s science behind this: the amygdalae, the brain’s primitive fear centres which help to process emotional memory and respond to stressful situations, have been shown to be activated more easily in reaction to negative emotional stimuli in women than in men. As a result, this suggests that women are more likely than men to form strong emotional memories of negative events or to ruminate more over things that have gone wrong in the past. The anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that helps us recognise errors and weigh options, is also larger in women.

      The knock-on effect of this, according to Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book The Confidence Code, is that women routinely fall victim to their own self-doubt: ‘Compared with men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions; they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities.’

      If women felt more able to own their failures, I suspect this would change. I certainly had my own mind blown when the author Sebastian Faulks told me that failure was all a matter of perception. Before our podcast interview, he sent me a playful email outlining his failures as:

      ‘… the time my friend Simon and I lost the final of the over-40s doubles and had to be content with the runner-up glassware.

      ‘At cricket, I remember once getting out when I had made 98 and chipped a return catch to the bowler …

      ‘One of my books was shortlisted for the Bancarella, a big prize in Italy, but did not win (the prize to the brother-in-law of the chairman of judges).

      ‘And of course there was an embarrassing setback when my famous soufflé à la nage d’homard rose a mere 288mm instead of the desiderated 290.’

      He was joking, of course, and when I did interview him for the podcast he spoke eloquently about his periods of depression and feeling as if he didn’t fit in at school. The point he had been trying to make was a serious one, however: it was that failure was all a matter of how you looked at it. On coming second in the Italian literary prize, for instance, he said: ‘Is that a failure? I mean, I wouldn’t have thought so, I thought it was rather a success to be going to Milan to be celebrated in a country not your own for a book with no Italian connection.’

      The author James Frey had a similar take, despite the fact that he was publicly outed for fabricating parts of his 2003 debut, A Million Little Pieces. The book, which had originally been marketed as a memoir, did not suffer from his notoriety and became a global bestseller.

      ‘I don’t look at things that other people might consider failures as failures, it’s just a process, right?’ he said. ‘And you can either handle it or you can’t. If you can’t, get out. But I don’t look at all the books that I tried to write before A Million Little Pieces that I threw away that were no good, as failures, I just look at them as part of the process.’

      To this day, Frey said, his mantra is: ‘Fail fast. Fail often.’ It’s a mantra that holds great weight in the (male-dominated) entrepreneurial world too, where risks have to be taken in order to think differently. In this sphere, failure is not only accepted but sometimes even celebrated. There are certain venture capitalists who won’t even think of parting with their cash unless an entrepreneur has failed with a start-up company at least once – the idea being that the entrepreneur will have learned from that failure, will have got all the mistakes out of their system, and will therefore present a sounder investment. Thomas Edison, after all, went through thousands of prototypes before perfecting his light bulb. Bill Gates’ first company was a failure. Over his career in major-league baseball, Babe Ruth set a new record for striking out 1,330 times but also set the record for home runs, hitting 714.

      When asked about his batting technique, Babe Ruth replied: ‘I swing as hard as I can … I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.’

      What Babe Ruth was essentially saying was this: that in order to succeed on a grand scale, you have to be willing to fail on an equally grand scale too. Often the former relies on the latter, which is why failure can be integral to success, not just on the baseball field, but in life too.

      What does it mean to fail? I think all it means is that we’re living life to its fullest. We’re experiencing it in several dimensions, rather than simply contenting ourselves with the flatness of a single, consistent emotion.

      We are living in technicolour, not black and white.

      We are learning as we go.

      And for all the challenges that come our way, I can’t help but continue to think: it really is an incredible ride.

       How to Fail at Fitting In

      When I was four, my family moved to Northern Ireland. It was 1982 and the height of the Troubles. Bombs routinely exploded in shopping centres and hotel lobbies. On the school run, my mother would be stopped at checkpoints manned by soldiers in camouflage with machine guns strapped around their chests. At night, the television news would dub over the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams’s voice, which always seemed bizarre to me, even as a child.

      When I did hear his voice, several years later, it was something of a disappointment. I’d built him up in my head to sound like a less friendly Darth Vader. As it was, he had the air of a geography teacher unable to keep control of the troublemakers at the back of the class.

      I, meanwhile, spoke with a precise, received pronunciation English accent and stood out from the first day of school. I had been born in Epsom, in the comparative safety of suburban Surrey. Every year, the Derby took place on the Downs next to our house and my mother would have a picnic to which she would invite a large number of family friends. I once saw the legendary jockey Lester Piggott fall off his horse and watched him being stretchered off, his face as white as plaster. I was struck by how small he was, even though I was pretty small myself back then.

      In Ireland, there were no picnics and no family friends. It was an isolating experience for all of us, but particularly for my mother who did not have a job through which she could meet new people. My father had moved us for his work, and was taking up a new position as a consultant surgeon at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry. It was a place where he would treat a lot of knee-cappings.

      I was aware of the civil unrest, and accepted it in that way that one does as a child. It simply became a way of life. The monsters under my bed were replaced by visions of balaclava-clad terrorists and I got used to the checkout ladies in the supermarket asking us suspiciously if we were ‘on holiday’ when we did the weekly shop. I hadn’t realised then that what we were actually being asked was whether we were there in connection with the British Army, but I do recall being scared that we’d be bombed by the IRA, to which my mother replied sensibly that my father ‘treats people from both sides’. That was true: he ministered to both Loyalists and Republicans. When a shattering bomb went off in Omagh in 1998, he rushed to help. My father went on СКАЧАТЬ