PepTalk
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PepTalk
#69: Playing to Win: Why You Need to Fail Better!
You need to FAIL BETTER!
I said it!
Ever wondered why failure feels so daunting? Discover how viewing failure through a different lens can revolutionize your journey to success. In this episode of Pep Talk, we'll uncover how Wile E. Coyote, Tom the Cat, and basketball legend Michael Jordan all turned their setbacks into stepping stones, transforming failure into valuable research. Through their stories, we aim to inspire you to reframe failure, seeing it as a critical part of your journey rather than a shameful end.
Let's tackle the fear of failure head-on and learn to embrace the risks necessary for growth. By comparing the strategies of playing to win vs. playing not to lose, we’ll draw from personal anecdotes and sporting analogies like prevent defense in football. We’ll discuss how our fear often leads us to miss out on potential growth and opportunities. Reframing failure from a source of guilt and shame to one of discovery empowers us to learn, adapt, and prepare for future successes. We even introduce the concept of a failure spectrum, highlighting the nuance between blameworthy and praiseworthy failures.
Leave a Fan Mail and let me know what you think about this episode and also give us a story about how failure has improved your life!
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When's the last time you had a pep talk? Pep talk, pep talk. Yo, when's the last time you had a pep talk? Has it been a minute? That's okay, you're in the right place. I've got you. Welcome to pep talk. And today I'm telling you that you need to learn to fail better, intrigued, let's get it. Welcome to Pep Talk, your weekly dose of pep encouragement, motivation and inspiration. This is the podcast that cheers you on and coaches you up, and I am your host, coach J, a life coach in DFW, and I'm so glad to be here with you for episode 69 of Pep Talk. So glad to be here with you. Hope that your week has started well and if it hasn't, if you're just needing a little bit of boost, then I hope that we're able to provide that for you in today's episode. If you're new to the podcast, welcome. You are an honorary member of the Pep Squad.
Speaker 1:We take it upon ourselves to be a community of people who seek to be the rising tide that lifts all ships. We want to spread encouragement. We want to leave people and environments in better shape when we leave them than they were, when we find them. As much as possible. We don't want to win by ourselves. We want to bring people along with us. Amen, all right, all right, all right. Now, for some reason, I found myself thinking about the old Looney Tunes, and I'm really about to date myself here. How many of y'all remember the old Looney Tunes, right? Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner Yo? Those cartoons I used to kill myself laughing at Wile E Coyote. Now, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can YouTube them. You can find them, they're out there for you.
Speaker 1:But Wile E Coyote was a coyote duh. Wile E Coyote was, you know, a coyote duh and he was always trying to catch this roadrunner who would always just outsmart him. And he would do everything. He would try to use dynamite from the Acme Corporation, he would try to create fake backgrounds and somehow the roadrunner would always outsmart him. How? The Roadrunner would always outsmart him and Wile E Coyote would always end up being the one that is harmed by the traps that he tried to use, the plants that he tried to use to catch the Roadrunner. If he tried to use the explosives to blow the Roadrunner up, he would end up getting blown up by the explosives. If he tried to use a fake background, the Roadrunner would seemingly run through the background into the horizon, and when Wile E Coyote would try to run after him, he'd run smack dab into it. You know, boom. It would be a debacle, and all you would hear is the Roadrunner saying beep, beep and then just running off.
Speaker 1:It was just craziness, but for some reason this week I was thinking about that and we always used to laugh at how every plan of the road of the coyote, every plan of his, failed. But this week I had a thought, and it was kind of an enduring thought. What if we lived our lives like Wile E Coyote? What if we looked at each one of his attempts not as a miserable attempt at being made a fool of, but what if we looked at each of his attempts as research toward getting better? Now I know, I know the way the cartoon is written. He's never supposed to catch the roadrunner, because that would be the end of the entire thing. Right, tom and Jerry, tom and Jerry. Tom was never able. Tom the Cat was never able to outwit Jerry the Mouse, but he kept trying. He tried over and over and over again, repeatedly, repeatedly, and just when he thought that he had the mouse caught, jerry would always figure out a way to outsmart him, by calling on, you know, the big bully bulldog on the block or getting inside of his little mouse hole. Whatever, he would always catch him.
Speaker 1:Or what about my favorite sport, basketball, michael Jordan. Okay, thinking about his art into becoming one of the greatest basketball players to ever play the game right, I think his first six seasons he didn't even make the playoffs, despite scoring, you know, doing amazing things, establishing himself, as you know, one of the greatest players ever Early in his career. He didn't even make the playoffs. Then, when he drafted, they drafted Scottie Pippen, got Horace Grant. They started making the playoffs, but it was a steady progression where each year they were getting put out by the Pistons, the Pistons were beating them up. Then they finally got past the Pistons and they got past the Cavs. Then they became the dominant team that we knew them to become, because once they got to the finals they weren't getting beat right, but it was getting to that point of failing repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly of failing repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly.
Speaker 1:And something interesting about the narrative behind Michael Jordan we often talk about how he had to learn from those failures and we give him grace that I don't think we give a lot of other athletes, but that's neither here nor there. Not getting into the GOAT discussion or anything, I'm not trying to make any enemies, but what I'm trying to say and what has been really, really it's gnawing at me as I make this episode is that in each of these instances, all of these people real, michael Jordan, fictional characters, tom Kat and Wile E Coyote what if we looked at everything that they were doing in a different light and we told a different story about it? What if I told you that the real story of Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner is that Wile E Coyote continually conducted research into the best ways to catch a coyote? Would that change the way you thought about his arc and his purpose? What if I told you that Tom the Cat was conducting experimental research into the many ways that someone could attempt to catch a mouse? Does that cause you to look at his story and his arc in a different way?
Speaker 1:And here's what I'm telling you we need to learn you and me, you and I. We need to learn to fail better. There's no other way around it. We need to learn to fail better and we need to be failing often. If you haven't failed lately, that's probably an indicator that you're not taking enough risks with your life. So in Samuel Beckett's Westward Ho, there is a quote in there that says Ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again. Fail again, fail better, again, fail better.
Speaker 1:And there is this implication that when we fail, we should be learning something from it. However, in research that I've done, and even looking back at my own life this whole idea of learning from failure it appears to be the exception rather than the rule, and what I mean by that is most of us are out here failing just for failure's sake. We're not taking anything from it, we are just failing repeatedly and we are staying the same, and that's not the way that it's supposed to work. Something is supposed to change within us as a result of failure. Michael Jordan became a better basketball player going through those Pistons teams, those late 80s, early 90s players. They toughened him up, they made him diversify his game because they had the Jordan rule, so if Jordan went to the hole, their job was to knock him down, and so Jordan had to learn to develop more of an outside shot Right. He had to learn to shore up his mid range shot. Jordan took the failure and he learned from it. He failed better.
Speaker 1:And when I say that we need to be failing better, that's exactly what I mean. I mean that we should be taking data from our failures and we should use it to make it better. I mean y'all, we cannot be out here. It's 2024. We cannot afford to be out here failing just for failure's sake. We need to be purposeful in what we're doing, in the risks that we're taking, and then there should always be a point when we fail that we evaluate and we reflect on what happened so that we can be better when we try again next time.
Speaker 1:So I learned in some of my research that we uh that that we expend a lot of energy maintaining a positive image of ourselves, and so, as a result, we tend to recognize failures and other people and pay close attention to them and remember them well, but when it comes to our own failures, we don't show as much interest. Isn't that interesting? So researchers call this motivated false memory, and what this means is that our selective amnesia helps us forget our failures or we fabulate a different story about them, and that enables us to misremember what actually happened so that we can insert a positive spin into it. So you are in a relationship, the relationship didn't go well and it ends horribly. But instead of remembering that it ended horribly, we might say you know, I grew too much for them. Maybe you were the issue. But you might say I grew too much for them or they weren't ready for the person that I was. Or we might say, oh, I just reached a point in my life where I just really needed to focus on me, when the actual story behind the breakup is that you caused the entire thing. Or we get fired from a job and we might say they fired me. You know, I was doing everything that I was supposed to be doing, I was doing what they trained me to do, and they still fired me for the very same thing.
Speaker 1:When, in reality, if we really take the rose-colored glasses off and take the selective amnesia out of it selective amnesia out of it maybe you were the actual issue. And see, although this process, this motivated false memory, this self-selected amnesia, is motivated by our need for self-enhancement, to keep ourselves looking good, a lot of times our brain, our minds do it. For us to maintain a positive image of ourselves Isn't that interesting? But I think the other part of that is also interesting, that we're able to remember other people's experiences and that we're able to learn from their mistakes and learn from their failures, even when we can't learn from our own. It's interesting. So Ronald Bledlow, at Singapore Management University, he and a group of researchers discovered that drawing lessons from other people's failures is particularly effective, but it's underused.
Speaker 1:So, for example, when I tell my kids you know, you've heard this a lot you tell your kids that the oven, the stove, is on, it's hot, hoping to spare them from burning themselves. What they're going to do? They're going to touch it to learn from them. They're going to touch it to learn for themselves. So in that case, they're not using right the information that I'm giving them from my life. Or when I'm in my classroom with students, I'm always passing along nuggets of information. I'm trying to give them wisdom because I want their lives to be better than mine. I don't want them to go through the same mistakes and failures and rejections and everything that I've gone through in life. So I want to spare them and hip them to game about life.
Speaker 1:I remember I had this student one time that said Mr B, I don't know why you're trying to give us all of this wisdom. We're going to do what we want to do and we'll just have to learn it the hard way. And my response was but why would you Like, if I'm giving you like? It's like playing Mario Brothers old school Mario Brothers on Nintendo Entertainment System. If somebody gives you the game guide and they have marked out every place in the game where they've made a mistake, but also told you the exact button combinations to use to get over that obstacle and to beat that board, wouldn't you use it? And I know some people out there are going to say, yeah, but I want to beat it myself, I want to beat it myself, I want to beat it myself. But when we're talking about life, I personally think that every leg up that we can give somebody else, I really think that we should give it to them. Yeah, there are going to be plenty of things in this life that we're going to have to face and learn from, but but if I can help somebody be better in just a small way than I was, and it helps them astronomically and exponentially. Don't I have a responsibility to do that? I think it's interesting.
Speaker 1:And their research about drawing lessons from other people's failures. It says that when study participants heard stories about failure, they were motivated to learn and they retained more information as a result. His team also found that our attitudes about failure matter. Study participants who saw failure as a valuable learning resource tended to learn more from failure stories. So I'm going to make another statement here that you may or may not agree with. We learn more from failure than we do from success.
Speaker 1:But here's the problem. Many of us are so afraid to fail that we try to avoid it at all costs, which stunts our growth. Many of us we play not methodical way of life, but when you're playing to win, you're looking to take the risk. You're looking to take the risk, you're looking to take the chance because you want to shore up your percentage possibility of winning. It's like in football At the end of the game.
Speaker 1:I can't stand it when I see teams begin to play prevent defense. Prevent defense is when all of the secondary they back up. They want to allow the offense to get just a little bit of yards, but not to go over the top and to win, instead of continuing to play the defense that was helping them to win in the first place. Like why change it up, keep playing the odds and play to win the game. That's a famous Herm Edwards quote. We play to win the game. We play to win. We don't play to lose, we play to win, and that's a completely different. Those are two completely different mindsets. Which one are you doing? Are you playing to lose? I mean, are you playing not to lose or are you playing to win?
Speaker 1:I know in my own life. I know in my own life I have been so afraid of failing, so afraid of failing, that I have kept myself from speaking up in meetings. I have kept myself from at it. After all, my brain has this habit of skipping all the way to point Z and assuming failure and then going through all the permutations of what that failure means, not just for me now but for me in the future. And so, because I'm trying to avoid the failure, I'm playing not to lose. I tend, I tended to put myself into these safe spaces. Do the safe thing, not take the risk, not seek out the grand adventure. I'll take a small adventure, but not seek out the grand adventure, to see what's really out there, what I can really do. And I've also realized that I need to fail better and I need to fail more.
Speaker 1:And it's kind of this thing of when we look back on our lives and I think I said this in the last episode it's going to be the risks that we didn't take that we're going to regret, be the risks that we didn't take that we're going to regret. But what if we took every chance? What if we faced every rejection? What if we failed often, failed quickly and failed better? How much more would we flourish and who might we actually become as a result of living our lives to win? Who would you be if you played to win more often, if you were aggressive, more aggressive with life, even more assertive, rather than living in a passive and pacifistic way and letting life come to you? What if you went out and actually grabbed life by the horns and saw where it could take you, if you were living with a more intentional methodology?
Speaker 1:I think it's time for us to reframe failure and its association with the words guilt and shame, and I think we need to replace guilt and shame with the words research and discovery, because in reality, that's actually what failure is. It's the narratives in our brain that causes us to default to the more emotional reactions of the failure. It's the guilt, so I can't talk about it. It's the guilt, so I have to make up a story about why this happened. It's a shame I can't look at myself properly because this didn't go right. It's a shame I messed up. So people are going to look at me like I'm continually a mess up.
Speaker 1:But what if we shifted and said that the failure that I just endured it was research, so that we can rebuild it and we can make it better? What if this failure was a source of discovery? So now I know who I need to be going forward, how I need to act, what I need to obtain, going forward so that I am better for the next time. And and and I need to say this again if you fail once, there needs to for the next time, and I need to say this again If you fail once, there needs to be a next time. Let me say it again If you fail once, there needs to be a next time. If not, you are severely handicapping yourself from learning and developing and from the growth that could possibly come out of what you just endured.
Speaker 1:What I think is cool also is that there is a spectrum of failure, because there are failures that we don't want to repeat, that we should never, you know, they just shouldn't happen. But there are also intelligent failures and those are the ones that grow us the most. And I found a really, really cool spectrum of failures looking in an article in the Harvard Business Review and I want to go through a little bit of these because it goes from a spectrum from blameworthy, which are the lower level failures that we don't want to repeat. They don't grow us as much as the other end, which are the praiseworthy failures, which are seen as the intelligent failures. So what are blameworthy failures, which are seen as the intelligent failure? So what are blameworthy failures? These are like deviants.
Speaker 1:So when an individual chooses to violate a prescribed process or practice that kind of failure we don't want to repeat or inattention an individual inadvertently deviates from specifications. That means maybe you're baking a cake and uh, instead of, instead of reading the directions, you just go off a feel based off of what you thought you saw somebody do on the food network. Uh, based on what you thought you saw your mama doing when you were playing video games and she was baking a cake. Right, that's inattention, not giving proper attention to something. You can fail there. Yeah, it can teach you to pay more attention next time, but you don't want to repeat the inattention failures. Too often they hold us back. A lack of ability An individual doesn't have the skills, conditions or the training to execute a job. Now what can you learn from this? Because you can learn from all of them. What can you learn from them To develop the skills for the next time? Right, okay, now I want to talk about the praiseworthy, the intelligent failures. These are the ones that studies have shown that can cause the most growth and development in our lives.
Speaker 1:At the top is exploratory testing. So this is an experiment conducted to expand knowledge and investigate a possibility that leads to an undesired result. So you have a process, you have a procedure and you want to see what happens. Most of the medications that are out in the world today are here because of medical trials that did not go according to plan, but they kept going and they kept going and they kept going and finally they were able to come up with something that helps society. That is intelligent failure.
Speaker 1:Hypothesis testing, an experiment conducted to prove that an idea or a design will succeed, but it fails. That's intelligent testing. You have a business idea and you think that it could be big. You have a hypothesis and you think that it could be big. You have a hypothesis right that your business idea that there is a segment of the population, a large segment, that would really benefit from creating kitchen tiles that were self-cleaning, so you never needed to mop again. Okay, so you test that hypothesis and the first couple of houses that you use it on it goes horribly wrong, but you can take that data and you can go back to the drawing board and come up with something else. That's an intelligent failure.
Speaker 1:What about uncertainty, a lack of clarity about future events that causes people to take seemingly reasonable actions that produce undesired results? These are intelligent failures that I'm saying we need to learn to fail more at and we need to learn to fail better at. What kind of failures do you find yourself making more often? The intelligent ones or the blameworthy ones? Are you just not paying attention or are you intentionally testing something out to see how it would work, or if it would work? With the intention of our lives, we would see a drastic difference in the way that we see ourselves, we would see a drastic difference in our output and we would see a drastic difference in the way that life is going for us and the people that we attract into our lives to help us accomplish the final version of what it is we're trying to do.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I've given you a lot of the back stuff. We've talked about the types of failure that are acceptable. We've established that we need to fail more. We need to fail often, right, so I want to tell you how to fail better, okay, and I want to just give you, just briefly, some things that you can focus on that I think can help you in your processing of failure. So the first thing is to create a safe space. You need to not be about the process, the work of creating a safe space for everybody else in your life. You need to create a safe space for yourself to fail and to experience that failure.
Speaker 1:And when I say that, what I mean is you need to quit being so judgmental on yourself. You need to quit telling yourself off every time you have a chance to. You need to quit speaking such mean things to yourselves when things don't go the way that you think that they should. Your safe space with yourself should be a space where you don't come walking back to yourself with your head down. Come on, if your friend came back to yourself with your head down, come on. If your friend came back to you and said, hey, I just got fired or my invention just blew up in my face, I'm a loser, I'm so horrible. You would say, wait, no, no, we're not talking like that over here. Then why is it acceptable for you to do that to yourself and please understand, I'm talking to me too why is it acceptable for you to call yourself a loser, for me to call myself a loser and then just to keep on going like nothing has happened? Y'all that's not safe.
Speaker 1:We are choosing violence regularly with ourselves, in the way that we think about ourselves and how we experience the things that don't go right in our lives. They are seasons. If you learn from them, they are seasons. So when things don't come right, go right. You should have a conversation with yourself where you're your own flavor flavor, you're your own hype person and you're like, okay, let's stop, let's write let's journal about this. What didn't go right? What actually happened? What didn't go right? What did go right? What, what? What's the learning lesson there? What can I take away from this so that the next time it can be better.
Speaker 1:And see, along with step number one of creating a safe space, go step number two, which is to tell yourself a better narrative. The stories that we tell ourselves. They have to be better stories if we want to live a better life and learn how to fail better. The story that we tell ourselves. It can't be fake. We're not doing the selective memory here, the selective amnesia. We're not doing that. We're going to tell a realistic story of what actually happened.
Speaker 1:I chickened out and didn't audition. Okay, why did you chicken out? I didn't think that I was capable, okay, okay, that's the story that we can tell ourselves. That's the narrative, because, see, nothing true and lasting can ever be built upon a lie. I'm gonna say it again Nothing true and lasting can ever be built on a lie, and that includes our lives. If we are building our experiences, if we are building our perspectives upon lies, then nothing that we do will be sustainable.
Speaker 1:We're just gonna keep inattentively failing, time after time after time. You've got to learn to tell yourself a new story. Yeah, this didn't work. Yeah, I was at fault, but I have learned from this. I know that I have it within me to do better next time. So I'm not going to give up. I might have gotten fired, but I'm going to write a new resume. I'm about to get out there.
Speaker 1:I might have gotten dumped, but I know I'm still a catch. I've got some work to do, but I know I'm still a catch. I know I chickened out on the audition, but I'm going to catch the next one. I'm going to find somebody to hold me accountable and I'm going to do this. My experiment failed. Let's do it again.
Speaker 1:You've got to tell yourself a new story. It needs to be a true story, but it also needs to be one that includes how far you've fallen. You can bounce back twice as high, because when you learn to fail better, the positive outcome of it has exponential possibilities. And then, last but certainly not least, if you want to learn how to fail better, you're going to have to just get out your own way and do stuff. Just do stuff. I don't know what it is in your life that you need to do. I don't know what it is that you need to start.
Speaker 1:Last episode was about starting. If you need to learn how to start, go back and listen to last episode. I don't know what you need to start. I don't know what you need to learn. How to start. Go back and listen to the last episode. I don't know what you need to start. I don't know what you need to do. I don't know what your ultimate goal is, but I'm telling you right now you've been sitting on it for too long.
Speaker 1:You need to get out there and fail, because the only way that you will ever see success in any given lane in your life is that you must be willing to do something and it not go well, and you come back and do it again and it still not go well. But you stick with it in the ups and in the downs, whether it's straight or whether it's curved, whether it's crooked, no matter what it looks like. You have to stick with it. You have to endure the failures to appreciate the success. And that's the thing, and that is how you learn to fail better. Listen again.
Speaker 1:This episode has been about telling you that you need to fail more and you need to fail better. That's just, that's it. That is it. So where can you fail more and where can you fail better? So we have a fan mail option.
Speaker 1:I would love to hear your failure stories. I would love to hear how you are failing more and failing better, and maybe what you've taken away from this episode. Just drop and shoot us a fan mail on our Buzzsprout link. We would love to hear from you and respond, maybe even read some of them on the air in the next few episodes. But I want to hear from you. I want to hear what you're failing at and how that failure is making you better. What stories are you telling yourself? How are you creating a safe space for yourself and what stuff are you doing? Because we're not being stagnant. Life is not for stagnancy. Life is for living, and in living there will be times where things don't work out the way that we want them to, but we don't let those times stop us. We just keep moving forward.
Speaker 1:So this has been episode 69 of Pep Talk with your host, Coach J. I'm so glad that you all have been here with us. Let us know what you think about the podcast. Hit me up at thepeppodcast at gmailcom or on at underscore JBSpeaks on Instagram, or send me a fan mail. Let me know what you're thinking. Leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. We appreciate you. I love you. I think that you're great. I think that you are destined for incredible things if you can get out of your own way. That's what somebody told me, so I'm telling you the same thing, and y'all know how we end things here Keep it love, keep it light and keep it peppy. I'll see you next week for episode 70 of Pep Talk. I love you. Y'all be blessed, peace.