Resilience is becoming a more common theme for people looking to develop and improve, but perhaps achievement is not related to persevering and striving, but rather beginning to enjoy failures and learning new lessons from them.

Thomas Edison is quoted as saying, “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” If you learn something new from each setback or failure, you continue to grow and improve. This is the whole idea of ​​reflective practice that exists in some professional streams, where you are expected to look back on a regular basis, spot key events and analyze them with a view to learning from them.

But there is more to failure than accepting it to learn lessons. Peter Bregman, in his HBR blog on the subject in November 2009, suggests that we should enjoy ‘trying to accomplish something’.

He lists three conditions that must be met in order for you to achieve something. The first two would be generally accepted, I hope, that is, wanting to achieve something and believing that you can achieve it. If there is no desire and passion to achieve, then what will be your driving force. In fact, why bother pointing to this? Second, if the goal is really impossible, you’re wasting your time. Even if you just think it’s impossible, again, which will make you dedicate 100% of your effort to the cause. As I write, the soccer world cup shows evidence of teams going a few goals behind and giving up simply because they no longer believe they can win.

The third condition that Bregman gives is that you should enjoy trying to achieve the goal. Actually, this is the opposite of achieving something: you have to positively enjoy the failures that you meet along the way. You have to be willing to try something over and over again, knowing that it is very likely that you will fail in this attempt, but not letting it discourage you.

Certainly, there is a danger that if we think we will not succeed, we will either give up without trying or become so preoccupied with possible failure that our Self 1 distracts us from peak performance altogether (see W. Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game of Work). . We need to adopt a Dr Pepper mindset and ask, “What’s the worst that can happen?”, then balance that with the positive outcomes of failure and continue regardless.

Once we start testing, we can have results, and from the results learning flows and from learning comes improvement. But this then flies in the face of the idea that people who are only ‘trying’ to achieve are not as successful as those who start with the knowledge that they will achieve.

So there are some negatives to this idea of ​​embracing failure that revolve around the idea that you set off with the expectation of failure. I don’t think this is what Bregman means.

Plan for success, and then if failure comes your way, embrace it willingly, recognize it as a step along the way, and learn as much as you can from it. Get up and give it another chance. If you fail a second time, begin to see it as a challenge to overcome, a game to play, a puzzle to solve, finding the solution that will ultimately unlock the prize.

An example that comes to mind was in the realm of sales and marketing. It was something he had never tackled and believed he couldn’t do. Consequently, I left it to a colleague who had a lot of practice. When I no longer had time to devote to it, I had to try it. After I stopped seeing rejections as something personal, I began to see them as a game, to find the key that would unlock the sale, without trying to impose it on the potential client. As I continued to persevere, I started to see little progress, but I also enjoyed the game. As an unexpected bonus, I also found that I was getting better at talking to strangers, small talk at parties, and actually taking an interest in people and their lives.

Yes, repetition can get boring if we allow it, however without repeated practice we will never be the best at what we do. Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book ‘Outliers’ acknowledges that it takes 4,000 hours of practice at something to turn pro. 8,000 hours to become a master and 10,000 hours to become an artist at the top of your field. Without practice we will not reach the top.

However, what does all this mean for us in the world of work?

I think there are two applications, firstly to improve the existing job that we have and secondly to help us in the search for a new job.

If we want to enjoy our current job, we need to recognize that the repetitive practices we are involved in are not only dull and boring, but also challenging for us. How can we improve and become brilliant in them? How many hours will we voluntarily dedicate to our work to become teachers? But also, how can we find interest in them and make our work more enjoyable? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book ‘Flow’ covers this in some detail.

However, it is to the art of job hunting that I believe this concept applies most fully. Where else do we experience failures that set us back so easily, that they make us consider giving up? What elements of the process can you learn from? Maybe it’s the feedback from the company that made you back down. It may also be how you felt while writing the documents. Or maybe you’ve identified areas where you skimped and know you should have done better. Your heart just wasn’t in this one and you are well aware that your efforts were lacking? How well did your CV fit the specific job?

However, aside from learning for next time, how can you turn it into a game, pitting your wits against deadly recruiters, playing them in their own games, trying to build a strategy that will beat them to getting hired?

How we react when things go wrong can definitely be key to our ultimate success. I especially value learning and one of my favorite quotes is “I’ve learned so much from my failures that I’m thinking of making a few more.” No, I am not planning to fail, but I am ready to embrace failure if it occurs and use it to my advantage, to achieve ultimate success.