Building Resilience to Failure

"Failure is a stepping stone to success".

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that count".

"Behind every successful person lies many failures".

The motivational quote on failure goes on and on...

Admit it, you hate failure. I hate it too, everyone does hate failure.

But you know the truth? You’ll fail more often than you’ll win.

So, how should you handle them? How should you de-catastrophize the catastrophe of failure? Follow me on this, let’s discuss.

When I was young, up to my 300L, I used to tell my friends I’m just favored and haven’t really tasted any sort of failure that I can remember. I’ve never failed any exam, repeat any class or write any exam twice for any reason.

I’m always one of the top students and I wrote my university entry exam all at once despite the horror stories of Jamb those days.

While in the Uni, I’ve had some pitch competitions, online challenges and ace them all. Maybe failure isn’t for me I used to think.

Around 2012 2013, I and my team had qualified for the national finals of Microsoft Imagine cup in Lagos. Top judges from Microsoft, brilliant students from OAU, LAUTECH, FUTA, etc. We all have to pitch our amazing products and get a chance of representing Nigeria in Russia.

Feeling motivated, my team had built a sign language recognition using the then cool Kinect.

We’ve demo-ed it time and time before our presentation and even integrated it with Microsoft Powerpoint to control our slides with just a hand gesture.

The ambient was cool, the stage was amazing and it was our turn.

I stunt to the stage like Jackie chan with the final move to kill the boss.

Our project was announced followed by cheers and claps and everyone was patiently waiting to see how our amazing product works.

Launch the project, gesture my hand to get a talkback on the signs I made but nothing happened. We tested it, it worked before, what’s happening?

I tried again and again all to no avail. By the time I let go, we’d covered almost 70% of our presentation time.

I started delivering gibberish. I asked God to tune the hands of time so that moment could pass but he didn’t. I faced it, I tasted it, my very first experience failing.

I didn’t do it among my friends or in my class, it happened on a global stage. What!!!

Well, it sounded unforgiven then but now, since I ventured into start-ups, I’ve experienced failure over and over again that it has become ad nauseam. Hating failure is like hating the weather. You really can’t do much about it except equip yourself to withstand it.

To really build resilience against failures, change your ways of explaining your failure. Do not explain your failure in ways that are personally debilitating. Don’t say things like it’s all my fault, I’m a failure after all. Interrogate yourself and see the reason why you truly weren’t the best that day, or maybe something beyond your control happened and because it did, it’s not your fault neither is it your village people. Don’t take it personally. People fail every day. Life is full of ups and downs and doesn’t own you a thing.

Most time when we fail at something, maybe we got rejected from a job application, our world stops and it seems everything is in ruin. Tell yourself failure isn’t permanent. It’s just a mirage. You’ll always bounce back.