Slamming your six iron into the ground, yelling at yourself, cursing
out your staff, second-guessing, berating bystanders—there are plenty of
ways we demonstrate our frustration that our best didn't work this
time.
But is it helpful?
Learning from a failure is critical. Connecting effort with failure
at an emotional level is crippling. After all, we've already agreed you
did your best.
Early in our careers, we're encouraged to avoid failure, and one way
we do that is by building up a set of emotions around failure, emotions
we try to avoid, and emotions that we associate with the effort of
people who fail. It turns out that this is precisely the opposite of the
approach of people who end up succeeding.
If you believe that righteous effort leads to the shame of personal failure, you'll seek to avoid righteous effort.
Successful people analytically figure out what didn't work and
redefine what their best work will be in the future. And then they get
back to work.
