How do you define failure?

Happy Sunday & thank you for opening this week’s #TheLifeofJLOWE newsletter!

It’s been quite a week on my end, but since it’s Memorial Day weekend here in the US, I’m finally getting a bit of rest. If you were here last week, you’d know I was going through it the past few weeks trying to balance work, family, friends and studying for my Series 66.

Unfortunately, I didn’t pass the Series 66 licensing exam on Thursday. I thought I’d be super transparent with you about that here, in the hopes of sharing what that “failure” meant for me.

Obviously I’m not perfect, and I live a far from perfect life - but that’s the whole reason I write this newsletter: to share the lessons I learn from the mistakes I make and the experiences I have.

So what happened?

Instead of boring you with excuses as to why I failed and saying how I could’ve studied more and checked over my work one more time or read the book more in depth blah blah blah, I want to share with you what it was like for me.

Immediately after I submitted the exam, it showed my score, and told me that I failed. It said I got 72, when the passing score was 73. (So frustrating!)

Of course, I was pissed. Of course I was upset, frustrated, annoyed, angry and most of all disappointed in myself. In the moments directly after receiving the score, I was lucky to not have anything throwable in my hands because I would’ve definitely thrown it! 😂 

The first thing I did was text a few people who I knew were anticipating me telling them my results, then I put on some music and tried my best to take deep breaths and meditate in the car before starting to drive home. It’s never a good idea to drive when you’re upset. 😵‍💫

Because it’s a financial license for my day job, I had to sit with those feelings of self-doubt and disappointment for a whole day before I told my co-workers the next day who knew I was out for the day to take the exam.

Luckily, I work with pretty great people who have all taken this exam before, so they understand the difficulty of it and helped me to not beat myself up over it.

After processing the result for over a day, a question that came up kind of as a joke was “how do you define failure?” 🤔 

This was a question that I raised in contrast to my previous thought exercises on “how do you define success?” and although I was just teasing myself when I said it to my coworker, thinking about it has helped me to move on from the failure and quickly get out of that self-doubting mentality that came in the immediate aftermath of it.

So, how do you define failure?

Obviously, there’s black-and-white, objective failure like me getting 72 on my exam when the passing score is 73. There’s failure on exams, there’s failure to deliver on your responsibilities, but for the purposes of today I want to explore how I’ve re-defined failure for myself over the years and my perspective on it, regardless of whether it’s black and white or not.

Let me caveat this message by saying that changing your perspective on failure doesn’t mean that in the moment - when you receive the news or “realize” that you failed - it’s not gonna suck. It is still going to suck, no matter what.

Cry, go for a walk, eat ice cream and take the time that you need to process it, but then come back to yourself, and come back to the perspective I’m about to describe.

How I think about failure

The most important quote for me that has helped me to navigate failure is the following:

So by extension, failure is power.

Failure is a part of life. We all fail at something. Some people fail bigger or smaller than others, but none of us will ever go through life without failure.

However, if you recognize that failure is power then you can actually be happy to fail at something. You can take your failures as learning moments, inflexion points in your life, pivotal moments, and they can give you the energy you need to start the next thing, or in many cases, to try again.

The most important thing that you can do is harness the power that failure gives you to become better. You learn what not to do the next time, and you get feedback on what you may have done wrong in your attempt. There’s always a lesson to be learnt through experiencing failure.

Conclusion

So how do you define failure?

The real point of posing this question isn’t to try and get you to define it for yourself in the same way that I asked you to define success for yourself a few weeks ago. Because let’s face it, failure is a bit more black and white than success is. Our feelings towards negative occurrences in life are often more amplified than our feelings towards positive ones. (That’s a whole psychology lesson on negative bias, so just take my word for it.)

In fact - stay with me here - what if you could actually define failure as success?

What if instead of defining failure as missing the mark, we define it as a learning experience or success in the sense that you learnt something new in the process, even if the final outcome wasn’t what you wanted. This brings me all the way back to when I wrote about falling in love with the process, not the end goal last year.

In this life, I know that I have failed, and I know that I will fail again. You will too.

In those experiences though, I want you to think about how you define failure, do your best to redefine failure as power, but above all, above everything that I’ve said today, never let your failures define you.

Until next Sunday,
Justin