How to Succeed at Failure
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his new podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.
Maybe your relationship collapsed, your company went under, or you got fired. Maybe you failed your exams even though you’d studied hard, or couldn’t find a publisher for your book, or dropped what would have been the winning touchdown pass.
This is not a case of regret, in which you wish you had tried harder. It’s much worse than that: You did your very best, and it simply wasn’t good enough. This kind of failure is especially painful, and can be hard to shake. If the book, the game, or the job was important to your identity, you might start to see your defeat as part of who you are too.
So what do you do now? You can just hunker down and hope that time will heal the wound. But perhaps you would prefer to deal with your pain and actively manage it. Doing so won’t just lessen your discomfort; with a little knowledge and practice, you can turn your failure into a source of growth, and even happiness.
