S5E6 – Redefining Failure and Embracing Growth

Join Subha and Hasita, as they engage in this conversation about the complexities of failure. They discuss the impact of social media on our view of success and failure and explore the three types of failures – preventable, complex, and intelligent. The duo challenges the conventional wisdom of ‘fail fast,’ emphasising the power of language in mitigating the impact of failures. With anecdotes from workplace dynamics to personal experiences, they delve into the layers of fear, resilience, and the importance of creating spaces for feedback in the journey towards growth and success. Tune in now!

Discussion Topics: Redefining Failure and Embracing Growth

• Fail so you’ve stories to tell
• Words have a lot of power – call it a mistake or an accident
• The impact of social media in highlighting your success or failure
• When you don’t know what to do, start a podcast
• “Fail fast & move on” – what is this fail fast?
• Giving regular feedbacks can help control failures
• We’re failures because we can’t think of a better word
• Fear is a tough emotion, fear of failure is even tougher

Transcript: Redefining Failure and Embracing Growth

Fail so you’ve stories to tell

Subha: Welcome to another episode of Small Talk With Rainkraft podcast. The value of the so-called failures that we go through and the old cliche like failure is an event, not a person well taken. And when you fail, you feel like you failed and not that the thing you tried failed. But now I realise when I look back and I observe some of my own conversations as a coach or when I’m a shoulder that someone’s crying on and the stories that I’m telling, they are all true of events that didn’t go as planned, I mean, I can call it a failure.

But the meat is really in those events, right? The client interaction didn’t go well. maybe the app you tried to make that didn’t ever take off. Or even a business line that you started. Or even a work trip that went really badly. The conference speech that you mucked up the stories is there. Because that’s where you and then it builds and then it builds like the one where you went to a client office and they agreed to the proposal and you came back and had lunch. There’s no story there. Or, how much do you embellish and tell that story?

Because it’s usually not Conveying a useful point. Fail so you may have stories to tell. Because then it’s also up to you how much masala you want to add to that. Depending on the audience how deep you want to take it, like how badly did you sink? And then kind of rose like a phoenix and all of that is on you and you can play around with it.

Hasita: It brings up its own, I think sometimes when you let go of a project, which was dear to you at some point, and which gave its own highs, there is that it’s an emotional thing, finally, right? It feels like, okay, am I letting it go too soon? Will this, cause me to be perceived as a failure? And I think for me, today, the question is, how do you even begin to soften that blow a little bit?

Subha: Because that’s this word failure. I just, this is too strong a word, and I don’t know its origins and all that, but I’m sure somewhere it’s linked to the word fear. I feel like it should be because of so many conversations, whether I’m wearing my coaching hat or a friend hat or even a parent hat when you really try to distil somebody’s sense of worry or anxiousness.

There is a fear of something and that fear is usually fear of failure. That’s, and it’s also said to be the most common or the largest fear that we face. Because we want we and failure is what I didn’t perform to my own expectations. I didn’t perform to your expectations, the world’s expectations. I didn’t like it if I didn’t get the promotion, it’s a failure.

Hasita: And it’s a very public failure. Somehow, as you were saying, I was just thinking about Tim Urban’s blog. Wait, but why? In which he has these beautiful illustrations around. Why is it that? Fear of social rejection is such a powerful thing because we are social beings. It’s wired in our DNA to find acceptance. Yeah, and I think failure on some level just reinforces the fact that we weren’t good enough to begin with.

Subha: I know I think it plays into everyone’s imposter syndrome. 

Hasita: So much on like a very Chimpanzee level if I could put it that way. 

Subha: No, and we both have young daughters. We see that on a daily basis, the need to fit in, conform, not be, and not have friends is a failure, right? Not fitting in to that.

Hasita: Even having difficult friendships is still a failure because maybe I did something too.

Subha: Yesterday there were a few very small girls outside my balcony just yelling at a girl on a higher floor. They’re like, hey, Maya, come down, we’re waiting to play with you. If you don’t come, we won’t be your friend. And I don’t think that girl was at home to even hear it. But if she was, like she’s failed, no, in that friendship pact.

Hasita: Yeah, and it really starts then, no? And finally, what are workplaces? They are social contexts, which help us make money. 

Subha: But finally, social context. No, I think we, because we throw this word for anything and everything, we don’t use the alternative too much. Like, you went and, you know, wrote your SAT or you went and wrote your midterm and either you pass or you fail. What about those hours of effort? Like they mean something, reminds.

Hasita: I went and slept during my MSET competitive exam. Two years of preparing only to fall asleep. 

Subha: And to the world and maybe even to yourself, the word that comes to mind is, Hey, I failed that test. I failed that attempt. And even something, and that is a, like two years of prep, but finally, it’s three hours of Testing your mettle and then even when you’ve been in a friendship or a marriage or a relationship and 15 years later, you’re questioning it. You’re wondering whether you’re in the right space. And then you say, Oh, that marriage failed, but it was 15 years in the making, right? Like how did it just fail?

Hasita: So much finality to just that statement, Oh, it failed. Correct. The end of that whole story in some ways. see failure in different contexts hits differently.

The 3 ways of looking at failure

Subha: Failure itself can be thought of in three ways. So the lowest kind of failure is something that’s preventable, right? Like you were boiling milk and didn’t turn off the stove at the right time. So that’s preventable. That’s a simple Failure. The next is a complex one where there is some uncertainty involved, something is unavoidable.

You didn’t realise that, I don’t know, a water pipe would burst and flood the office, et cetera, something a little more complex. And the third one, which I guess ultimately when we say we are a team that fails fast, a team that’s innovative, et cetera, is an intelligent failure where you are trying something, you’re planning for something, you’ve thought it through a little bit and then it could go either way.

And that’s the one where you want to maximise. Those are the ones that you want to have more of. Knowing full well that, like, I keep saying it, I used to run an ops shop. I’m not expecting that there will be a day when every transaction goes smoothly. Right? There are going to be bad days and bad moments.

But intelligent failures are, for example, we used to do that a lot. Like we used to make process tweaks. We used to say, Hey, something as simple as even, in banking, like how your counter is designed. Maybe if we make them. Kind of submit here, scan here, and sign here. This workflow works better.

We try it out for two weeks and then you realise you’ve created a bigger mess. And so you go back to the yeah. But all those are the intelligent types which you want to allow for which you want to let people say, Hey, I have an idea. I have a kind of a hypothesis. Can we try it out? Makes sense.

Hasita: It’s not always the same and maybe for some people failure at work might mean different things as well, right? Like in terms of what emotional weight you carry off the back of that. But in a culture or let’s say there’s a very small organisation, a small team of people hoping to build something working towards something. What’s a way to soften that blow really?

Words have a lot of power – call it a mistake or an accident

Subha: I think words have a lot of power. No, I mean, we both know that. 

Hasita: But I mean, it was Dumbledore who said it first. 

Subha: I think the language that we use in Whether it’s in professional or personal context, if we’re a little more mindful and call things what they are and use maybe alternative words.

For example, sometimes it’s just a mistake. You knew how to do it. Took a wrong step and it’s a mistake. Sometimes it’s an accident. Right? Sometimes it’s like, Hey, I tried that. It didn’t go as planned and use those words, even when consoling someone about it or even as a supervisor reviewing it, whatever that may be. Hey, I heard you tried something different. What happened? And because when it goes well, you’re suddenly that same person who gets an award for being innovative.

The impact of social media in highlighting your success or failure

Hasita: And the funny thing is that person still doesn’t understand why they’re being awarded. You know what I mean? Like today the dissonance between perceived success and perceived failure is only growing I think with social media and our consistent need to show off. It’s like in both cases you don’t know what you did right or what you did wrong.

Subha: Like this lady who’s So beautiful and so elegant and just a wow. She’s in some small sari shop or rather dress material store in Delhi. And she’s been churning out videos for God knows how long, right? Trying to sell those salwar suits and suddenly… Ranbir Singh comes into the picture and makes her go viral. Suddenly she’s a success and it won’t take long to, for some reason why she’s now a failure. Because she couldn’t… Continue that trajectory, so to speak.

When you don’t know what to do, start a podcast

Subha: So, you know, one of our favourite books last year, I guess, was the psychology of money. And then he also went on to do something that we have started making a little fun of honestly, start a podcast. So when you don’t know what to do, start a podcast. I haven’t been listening to it because I just liked the book and I wanted to leave it at that, but I heard him on Tim Ferriss recently because he’s got a new book and he now has to promote that, et cetera, and they were having a very genuine, honest conversation and someone who’s got the audience like Tim Ferriss and his success started with his books, right?

The four hour work week catapulted him into the limelight. And he was saying how like I’ve done this podcast now for so many years and I know I have an audience, but if I stop a year or two later, and if I’m lucky, it’ll be a year or two later, I think many people won’t even remember that I had a podcast or miss it because I’m there present right now when you kind of open the app, you listen, right?

But my books will still keep up in the money, the royalties, right? Because it’s kind of a more permanent reminder or something. And then Morgan’s response was interesting. He said I had a very successful book. I didn’t know and I wrote it for myself in a way and I didn’t know that would happen and I could have just stopped there and lived off that fame, but I started a podcast.

Hasita: so that I can stay top of mind.

Subha: And he said, I was so pleasantly surprised that people are actually listening to me. And the funny part is that he said, I realised it’s a new audience because all I do is go there and each episode I read a blog post that I wrote many years ago. Because this audience has never read that blog post.

Hasita: Even like the people that we really look up to, I think are finally stumbling into success and probably also very privately stumbling into a lot of failures, I think, which we don’t see and acknowledge.

Subha: And what we see also, like, I mean, somebody is trying to put a rocket in space and it doesn’t take off and it fails to take off. But there are years of, stuff going wrong that have gone into a lot of I’m sure existential level crises.

Hasita: And I’m just wondering, like, how do you feel about Instagram motivation? And I’m specifically thinking in terms of, how there’s this quote that says fail fast and move on. 

“Fail fast & move on” – what is this fail fast?

Subha: I think that’s actually our undoing because we’ve made it to extremes. You do something and then, put in years of effort, you try, and then at some point, it may fail and that’s a failure at one end, like, you know, and at the other end, we’re telling people like, keep failing, please keep failing, fail fast

Hasita: And God damn it. You can’t then also be delicate about it. Be really strong. 

Subha: So what is to fail fast? Like, how do you fail fast? Do you intentionally do like?

Hasita: Like you set out and say, okay, today I will fail once or like this week I have a target like, it’s quite confusing in some ways. Or maybe it’s just that it has been twisted to become confusing. Maybe the essence was something else.

Subha: I think the essence was to keep listening to the feedback. The frequency of your feedback loop should be really that much faster so that you can make decisions based on that like you create a product or even you write some code. Don’t wait for six months later, when you have the user testing phase to know if it’s working or not, but do that on a weekly basis or every 10 days and know what part is working,

Giving regular feedbacks can help control failures

Subha: Whenever we talk about performance management, we say that the biggest problem is you tell the employee once in six months. Right? And that’s why they take it badly or personally or they’ve come in with that six months of expectation because we don’t give feedback more often.

Right? So maybe that’s the thing as an individual also. I can say my manager didn’t give me feedback for six months, but also means dude, you didn’t ask for six months. Like you didn’t ask anybody. 

Hasita: So what I’m really taking away is one, the creation of those spaces where it’s okay for someone to ask for feedback and for it to kind of go both ways. And really softens.

Subha: It really does. It is sometimes said, Okay, I won’t use this word. What else can I call it? Makes you think, really think in terms of what else. I think that’s one of the things that’s also been taking a hit in the last few years. I was listening to this one, Dr Amy Edmondson on I think Simon’s next podcast. She’s a Harvard professor and apparently, he credited her with coining psychological safety. She said it was in literature even earlier, but what she coined was team psychological safety.

So where teams feel safe enough to, uh, bounce things off each other, give each other this, you know, frequent feedback that we’re talking about. And that has. Really diminished in this virtual and hybrid world. It’s true, right? If you’re in an office space and you’re thinking of doing something or trying something, you have the opportunity to look left or right and say, Hey, what do you think?

And somebody will give you either for the sake of it or honestly, but you’ll get some. feedback. Or even sometimes you have a slide deck open and a colleague walks by and you say, Hey, what do you, how does it look? And by their facial and body language, you know, whether you’re kind of close to the mark or not, but.

Hasita: It’s a loss that is in some ways to not be able to have that.

Subha: So she talks about the need to create that culture, not just by saying that, putting up on your website that I’m an innovative organisation. But how do you back that up? How do you create these spaces? Like the 3M example, which is so often quoted that they do give people the time and space to try other things, but they also apparently have a day in the year when all engineers, it’s voluntary, can come and talk about it.

The things you tried didn’t work. I’m just sharing it because someone else may say, Hey, I have some use for that halfway thing you’ve created, or I can collaborate with you or I can help you fix it. And there are so many ways to go from there. Even the medical profession has that from our intense knowledge of Grey’s Anatomy, where you go up on stage and talk about a case that didn’t go right.

Hasita: And human beings are involved.

We’re failures because we can’t think of a better word

Subha: So, I think this virtual world really does take that away from us, but as individuals and as employees and as team members, founders, whatever role I think what I’ve been taking away from a lot of this is that we’re using failure because we have, don’t have the energy to think of another word, but.

When I’m trying to do something new, maybe just look left or right and bounce it off somebody, maybe they’ll have a very different viewpoint that will be helpful. And then as you’re going through the process, have a group that can give you feedback.

I mean, even in your personal life, right? Even when you’re starting out. I mean, we both kind of stepped out into new territory for ourselves work-wise. And this one, it helped immensely that we had each other and we had others who could say, this seems to be working. But this doesn’t seem to be your cup of tea.

Do you really want to continue that? And then when something does go wrong, sit down with Yeah. The relevant people and maybe just talk it out or ask the questions of yourself or make them ask the questions to say what didn’t go right. Because I think none of this is, I mean that old cliche, like none of this is failure, right? You have to just pick up something from it and move forward.

Hasita: Yeah, and sometimes I think labelling it with such a big label really prevents you from doing that in so many ways.

Subha: Because if it’s a failure, then you have to put it in a box and shut it in. And it’s got history, right?

Hasita: Like, okay, here’s one more.

Subha: One more. And why would I want to look at that box? Because it’s a failure. It didn’t work, right? I have nothing to take away from it. So I think it’s helpful to reframe a lot of this. And create teams and systems to give us that feedback.

Fear is a tough emotion, fear of failure is even tougher

Subha: I think fear itself is a tough emotion. Fear of failure is even tougher. But as a coach, I do find myself often saying be kinder to yourself, but these are some of the tools, acknowledging that there is a fear of something and that fear is a failure in whatever shape or form it could come from seeing what affirmative action is.

Statements I can tell myself, what things in the past I can remind myself of, where hey, I have done that before, or I have tried something difficult and succeeded. I am okay with fine, I didn’t get that promotion. Even four years ago, it took six months longer, but You know, I survived.

Wasn’t the end of the world or everything Doesn’t have to be perfect? Which I see a lot nowadays because so many more people are changing careers and returning from breaks. Putting themselves out into the world in a way that’s very scary and so there’s a fear that I won’t succeed and the opposite of that is not failure.

Hasita: That’s a nice reminder much needed also.

Subha: That’s it, folks. Tell us what scares you the most. What are you afraid of? Maybe not doing it just the right way. Is there really that right way? What can you do to move forward? Catch you next time. Bye. Bye.