Everyone makes mistakes. As Simone de Beauvoir reminds us, failure
is a condition of life. When you fail or make a mistake, there is a good
way and bad ways to handle it. Bad ways include making lame excuses, blaming
someone else, just blowing it off (“it is what it is”), and avoiding
responsibility by deflecting attention (your own and other people’s). Another bad way is to wallow in your mistake
like a hippopotamus or get stuck in the past like a fly trying to tango on a
wad of gum. The good way to handle it has six steps. If you follow them, you
will come to cherish your failures and mistakes.
Failure is a Gift
Every Thanksgiving in our family we go around the table and say what we’re thankful for. I always begin by being thankful for my family of course, those present and those who passed away. But I always also say that I am thankful for my mistakes, because they helped me become the person I am and get to where I am today. A mistake, handled correctly, is a blessing, an opportunity. Failure is the left hand of striving. Failures are the pegs by which we lift ourselves up the pegboard of life. Mistakes and failures are truly roses, for though they hurt us with their thorns, they are beautiful in their own way, and our days are better for them. “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you” (Barak Obama), for “only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly” (Robert F. Kennedy). Failure is a gift, an opportunity. As Samuel Beckett urges, “try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
So what are the six steps for dealing with a mistake or failure?
How to Deal with Failure
1. Take responsibility—own the mistake.
2. Make amends and fix the problem (make things better)
3. Learn from your mistake/failure
4. Process as necessary
5. Change your behavior
6. Move on
Take responsibility. Don’t exaggerate your failure or mistake, but don’t minimize it either. Look at it fairly and objectively and recognize it for what it is. People deflect and try to avoid responsibility in many ways. “You’re not perfect”; “you make mistakes too”; “you count everything.” That someone else also makes mistakes doesn’t change the fact that you did. That your partner counts everything, if true, doesn’t change the fact that there is something to count. “You made me do it” is rarely true, unless they put a gun to your head and threatened to shoot unless you did what they demanded. Own your mistakes and failures. It’s the only way you will grow and not poison your relationships. As Daniel Dennett said, “the chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself.”
Make amends and make things better. When your mistake or failure hurts someone else, you owe them something. If it’s a small thing, a simple apology might be enough. Acknowledge the mistake and express regret. When feasible, you should also undo the harm. If you stole money, return the money. If you spread lies, tell everyone the truth (make a public retraction). Make amends. You made someone worse off, so find an appropriate way to make them better off again. Your mistake or failure created a problem. How can you fix the problem? If you overslept the final exam, what can you do to make things better? Speak to your professor, repeat the course, apply to a different college—what needs to be done now in the wake of your failure or mistake? If you killed a pedestrian with your car, you can’t bring them back to life. But you can work for auto safety and the compensation of victims—contribute, volunteer, be a spokesperson. Sometime it’s obvious how to make amends. Sometimes it requires creativity.
3. Learn from your mistake or failure. This is the most important step and often the hardest. If the mistake is simple and straightforward, the answer may be easy (set your alarm clock). But often you learn a great deal by asking what the mistake shows about you, about your attitudes and habits and ways of thinking, about how you relate to people and tend to act and think.
Mistakes can teach you about how to act, about others, and about yourself. You can learn better strategies for reaching your goals, better ways to relate to other people, and better ways to think and understand. Your mistakes can help you understand other people better, for example by gaining empathy for others who make mistakes or teaching you whom not to trust. You can gain insight into yourself and critically examine your attitudes by asking “what about me led to that mistake, and what does it show about me?”
A mistake is also a kind of cross-road. Confucious is reported to have said “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.” (It’s not in the Analects as such.) Roy Sorensen said “Every success is the tip of an iceberg of failure.” When we fail or make a mistake, we can pick ourselves up, learn, and persevere. Sometimes we musn’t let failure stop us. “Love and action always imply a failure,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting.” Yet sometimes failure makes us face a painful reality. Real wisdom can be accepting defeat and moving on. This can be tough even about smaller goals, but when you accept defeat about a major life goal (a career, a marriage) it can be devastating. This is what Jonathan Mitchell calls an “existential failure.” An aspiring actor or singer may have to recognize that their career is never going to happen. Most new philosophy Ph.D.’s want to become professors, but, in any given year, there are far fewer open, secure academic jobs in philosophy than there are new Ph. D.s. At some point, more than half of Philosophy Ph.D.s decide to pursue a different career. What they learn from their failures is that they must re-define themselves. They need to radically change their goal. That means changing who they are, the narrative of their life. So when we fail in a big way or make a big mistake (as when a Doctor’s mistake kills a patient), we have a decision to make. Do we “get back on the horse” or trade in the horse for a skateboard? Sometimes we know the answer because we’ve been hiding from it for some time. Sometimes it takes a deep process of soul-searching.
4. Process. People who make an important mistake or experience a significant failure often undergo emotional upheaval. Take the time to grieve, feel regret, deal with a sense of humiliation, come to terms with changes in your life, and whatever else the mistake or failure brings up.
5. Change your behavior. Learning from your mistake doesn’t help much if you keep doing the same unhelpful things over and over. You have to implement what you’re learned in the way you live. https://acupofwhy.com/emotions-and-personal-growth/ For most things, change is a process. Expect progress, not perfection. “Two steps forward, one step back” still gets you there, unless the one step back is fatal. Some things you have to change immediately, absolutely, and for good.
6. Move on. After your mistake or failure comes the rest of your life. Jump into it with zest and relish. Don’t forget your mistakes. They are part of the stem of your history. Now go forth and blossom.
How Not to Deal with Failure
The bad ways are, basically, avoiding the six steps: not taking responsibility, not making amends, not changing your behavior, and so on. So I’ll just mention some common examples.
There are a million ways of deflecting to avoid facing responsibility. People deflect because they don’t feel safe, either from others or from themselves. They may fear other people’s reaction if they admit fault. For example, they may fear social stigma. They may fear being demeaned and berated by a spouse. Or they may be so insecure that admitting even a slight imperfection is painful and threatening, as if that would validate the voice in their heads that says “you’re no good, you’re worthless.” Either form of insecurity prompts people to avoid taking responsibility for themselves. So people might rewrite history, denying the facts, changing what people said or did, making lame excuses—whatever it takes to make them seem less at fault. People might deflect by throwing up a smoke screen, basically changing the subject to avoid dealing with the topic of their responsibility. Kellyanne Conway was famous for responding to almost every criticism of Republicans by saying “well how about” something a Democrat did, avoiding valid criticisms by shifting the topic to something else. “You do it too” or “how about when you did so-and-so” are common forms of this (logicians call it the fallacy of “tu quoque.”) Another form of deflection is attacking the other person for noticing what you did: “You always demean me,” “you count everything,” “you love to put me down,” or even “you’re being abusive.” The problem is what you did, not that they noticed it. Making up lame excuses and pathetic justifications for what you did is another form of deflection. “It wasn’t really my fault”; “there is nothing else I could have done”; and “anyone else would have done the same” are common forms of lame excuses and justifications (except when they’re actually true). It is tempting to blame someone else for your mistake. All of these forms of deflection cause fights and resentment, make the other person feel you are untrustworthy and dishonest, and keep you from learning anything from your mistake. Deflecting from yourself can keep you from fixing what you did. It is much better simply to accept responsibility. Unless you’re confessing to a crime or something profoundly serious, nothing terrible is going to happen. No bridge will collapse if you admit you forgot to take out the trash.
People don’t make amends or fix the problem because they don’t want to pay the cost, either material or psychological. If you got a promotion by spreading false rumors about a colleague, you may not want to risk losing the promotion (material cost). Making amends may cause you to lose status or feel humiliated (psychological cost). But if you failed or made a mistake, you hurt someone (and so you owe them something) or created a problem (which needs to be fixed). The problem remains whether you want to face it or not. If you don’t make amends and address the problem, your failure is like a burr buried in your skin. It doesn’t go away. Better to get it out, deal with it honestly, address the problem and make amends.
People don’t learn from their mistakes and change their behavior for several reasons: because they didn’t take responsibility; because they are lazy or selfish and don’t want to have to change; because they lack insight about their mistake; or because they have deeper attitudes that make it hard to change. If you think people’s value comes from being “winners” and not “losers” (as Mary Trump claims Donald does), it is not easy to stop cheating and lying—you have to change your entire perspective on life to be comfortable with losing when you can win by cheating (and then deflect to justify yourself). The possibilities are as varied as people are.
It is less common for people to be unable to move on from their failures and mistakes, but potentially more devastating. The barrier to moving on can be external–people in your life who won’t let you come to terms with your past. Or the barrier can be internal, self-imposed. Guilt and shame are powerful forces that can mutilate a life. As part of a learning process, guilt and shame can be both necessary and a part of healing. Guilt and shame need not be bad. They should be used to make amends and grow into a better person. But being stuck in unassuageable guilt and shame is destructive. Whether the barrier is external or internal, therapy may be needed to escape the trap. (You’ll find a few tips on finding a therapist in the last section of https://acupofwhy.com/building-healthy-relationships/)
Last Thoughts
There is a story about the great Beethoven pianist Artur Schnable. After listening to a young aspiring pianist playing Beethoven, Schnabel shook his head and said “he’s not even good enough to make mistakes.” This story has stuck with me since my father told it to me. If you live life richly, striving with passion for important goals, often just beyond your reach, you will make mistakes. “Failure is success in progress,” Einstein reportedly said. (It’s amazing how many widely cited quotations can’t be verified.) Mistakes and failures are undeniably painful. But human beings are restless strivers whose finite resources fall far short of our unbounded aspiration. We are flawed and finite mortals who can envision perfection and eternity. So mistakes and failures are sewn into our nature. They help define human existence. What is also distinctly human is our ability to use failure as a building block. Failure is a door. It is a barrier, the seal of our prison. But it can also be an opening into a marvelous new world. Learn when to love the door and when to step through the doorway.
Disclaimer: Nothing that appears on this blog is meant to replace legal advice, therapy, or medical treatment. I am not providing legal, medical, or mental health advice. Always seek the advice of your own attorney or medical or mental health provider about specific questions concerning your specific health or legal issues.
