Embracing Failure To Become A Successful Young Person
The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success, written by the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle, is an underrated guide to post-college life and the importance of embracing failure. It can be categorized as a self-help guide on how to benefit from failing, be it in romance or at work, by looking at systemic failures and mistakes in media, big business, and finance.
The book is particularly resonant among young readers because they can learn to embrace failure as a way to develop resiliency and take calculated risks.
“Often failure is the result of doing something very right: trying something that you’ve never done before,” McArdle writes in the preface. America was built on the legacy of failure, of people who learned from their mistakes. Yet, in an era when failure is less costly than in previous generations, the country has become more risk-averse and less willing to take chances. On a personal level, that may mean staying in one city rather than moving for a new job—or, on the national level, of the FDA slow-walking approval of at-home COVID-19 testing kits.
The Up Side of Down is a primer on how that preference for safety and the status quo over risk and change has profound personal and society-wide consequences. If young people want to get an edge in their career, or feel more in control of their life, taking McArdle’s advice on getting comfortable with risk-taking, building resiliency, and dealing with anxiety will go far.
Failure, in this context, means setting goals and taking small, manageable risks to achieve them. When you fail, you move toward your goal and also learn something useful. It’s a short-term setback with long-term benefits. Success is a process that isn’t guaranteed. It’s extremely hard to plan success and avoid failure, partially because, as McArdle argues, failing at something is the best way to learn.
Experience teaches us hard lessons. The idealistic, starry-eyed college graduate, for example, may cling to their romantic relationship far past its expiration date. McArdle did this, spending years in a serious relationship with someone uninterested in marrying her. When it ended, she tried to get him back and fell for the sunk cost fallacy. After all those years, she didn’t want that time and effort to go to waste. But the real failure in a relationship isn’t a break up—it’s not moving on.
Instead of taking a risk for a better future, McArdle was more concerned about what she had lost. That sense of loss aversion is a danger in your personal life as much as it is in your professional life.
For success in romantic and career goals, McArdle notes, the key is to get yourself unstuck and keep moving. Sometimes, it really is as simple as leaving the past behind: One can move to a different city with a better dating or job market. Staying in an unfulfilling relationship, or the same town when you lose your job, can make you miserable. There are few miseries as harsh as long-term unemployment. “People who have had a bout of unemployment suffer detectable long-term effects in their career path,” McArdle writes, and warns of the psychological and economic double blow people take from unemployment.
The point is that looking for a job means “creating openings for something to happen”. Dedicating time to getting a job, either by applying or meeting people or working a temporary job, improves your chances. Treating the job hunt like a job means you’re taking action that will eventually pay off, rather than waiting for something to happen. And jobs don’t hunt down people—people hunt down jobs.
This rather straightforward advice is not easy in practice or without sacrifice—but it’s the key to bettering your life. Failure is demoralizing and the benefits aren’t immediate or obvious, but it can help you in the future.
To combat that present pain, McArdle suggests having a system that keeps you focused on looking for a job every day, much like salesmen do to keep making cold calls:
1. Set specific goals for input, not output.
2. Record your effort.
3. Use a script.
4. Surround yourself with other people who are going through the same thing.
In this case, focusing on action over inaction is the best approach. Action distracts us from obsessing over past failure and moves us toward something better. That future view is what makes failure valuable: experience goes further than theory, and the only way to gain experience is by taking risks. It builds resiliency and prepares us for a better life.
Taking a proactive approach and embracing small failures makes bigger failures easier to stomach. As a personal example, my media job in DC ended a year after I was hired due to a restructuring that laid off full-time writers for (cheaper) freelancers, which was disappointing. Then I found a sales job in Pittsburgh, and that was equally disappointing. After two rapid failures, though, I ended up in Prague, Czech Republic for a master’s. When I returned to America, I found a job at a higher education think tank. The path was not ideal—it was stressful, annoying, and anxiety-inducing—but one can’t plan every aspect of the future.
Sometimes, all you can do is take a leap and hope for the best. Fortune favors the bold, after all, and The Up Side of Down is a useful guide for learning this lesson.