We’re All Failures - Forbes.com
aren’t we all doomed to lifetimes of failure? Can we avoid that?
“One answer is that we shouldn’t try to avoid that,” says psychologist Dr. Richard Farson, co-author, with Ralph Keyes, of The Innovation Paradox: The Success of Failure, The Failure of Success. Instead we should understand that our feelings of failure often stem from our successes, he says. That’s because we, like the superstars above, adjust to success quickly.
“What happens to people is that when they get to a state of betterment in their lives, instead of feeling satisfied, they feel discontent,” says Farson. “It’s the theory of rising expectations.”
…
Farson also points out that, paradoxically, success and failure create each other, and we should court failure in order to spur innovation. “Failure is indistinguishable from success,” he says. “One not only leads to the other, but appears to be the other.”
…
greatest failure. In fact he saw the two as inseparable. “All of us have failed to reach our dreams of perfection,” he explained. “So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.”
But if that’s the sunny side of failure, here is the other side. We’re all doomed to grapple with it for life. We quickly adjust to success, but failure stays fresh. Why? Blame genetics.
“Our mind evolved to support an active organism rather than a happy organism,” says Dr. Jutta Heckhausen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in lifespan developmental psychology. “Negative things, we remember them much longer … In terms of evolutionary behavior this has the effect of making us act. Happiness doesn’t have much survival benefit.”
So what is failure’s benefit? The challenge, says Heckhausen, of stretching your competency, even if it courts failure, makes life exciting. “The risk of failure, the challenge of mastering something that is not easy … is an exhilarating feeling,” she says. “It’s more than just cruising along. That’s fairly boring.”