Best Practices: Acknowledging Failure

Of the various tasks I accomplish at work, one is sending a daily email that briefly sums up some positive, useful news that's easily consumable to the majority of folks in my building and some others around the country.  One item we encourage others to share is best practices--these practices could be useable for sales, meetings, projects, etc.  The point being: if you have something that works, share it.

When I joined my current team, they had been sending out a tri-weekly newsletter passing on somewhat similar information to the same people.  The problem was that they found nobody really read it.  Consistent with our fast paced, short attention span society, people simply didn't want to take the time to read the newsletter.  Initially, it my task was to carry on this newsletter's production; however, before my first week ended that task was nixed.  This decision to discontinue the struggling newsletter brought forth two very important results.  First, the birth of our email, which has been cherished and read by nearly all of the recipients (we constantly get very positive feedback).  Second, and arguably more important, the best practice of acknowledging failure and moving on materialized as well.  We decided it should be a mantra of our team: Don't be afraid to acknowledge that something isn't working.  As my boss has said, sometimes stopping something is just as important as starting something.

I propose that this "best practice" should be utilized both in work and in life.  Too many times, we lost sight of what's not working.  We might be always look for ways to improve ourselves--mainly through additions.  We want to learn a language, take a class, exercise more, etc.  Problematically, we too often neglect the dead weight we're carrying around.  If we could learn to rid ourselves of this dead weight, think of the possibilities!

I think the most obvious reason we choose to be oblivious when recognizing our failures is pride.  We are so caught up with maintaining as certain sense of pride, we can lose sight of what's right in front of us.  Problematically, we tend to carry a heavily negative connotation with failure.  Obviously, we shouldn't be striving for failure, but it'd be foolish to think failure can be evaded.  Thus, it'd be advantageous for us, rather, to pick out our own failure and move on.  If we can pick out failures then we can improve as people.  It's not a matter of simply saying, "Okay, I've failed," and moving on.  No, that leads to nothing positive (instead you'll keep repeating the same mistakes).  To truly allow a positive manifestation to arise out of our failures we must learn and move on.  Then, instead of constantly failing we improve on mistakes and get better.

Dealing with failure can be tricky.  If you ignore it, it will continue to drag you down knowingly or unknowingly; on the other hand, if you do admit it and use it as an excuse, or blindly move on, it will equally drag you down.  The type of adaptation and attention needed to utilize failure in our favor is what has kept progress going.  I truly believe successful people have mastered (mostly) this concept.

At the end of the day, life isn't going to work out the way we hope.  Our decisions aren't always going to strike gold.  We aren't going to be the best we can be.  It's the volatility of life.  In our relationships, our work ethic, our education, our careers, etc we are bound to fail.  Will you allow that to weigh you down to incorrigible depths or will you cut it off to ensure perpetual buoyancy? It's a best practice worth sharing.

Robert