The tightrope walk of having things go exactly the way you want them to

True, the Apollo 11 mission had to go exactly as planned in order to be a success. But most of our stuff isn’t like that. (SDASM Archives)

A young man had a big dream. He wanted to leave his job and create a business that would sustain him. He was afraid of failing.

I asked him how he would define failure — and success. After all, if you know what you are going for and what you’re trying to avoid, you can create a vision for the future and a map that will help you find your way.

To my surprise, he defined failure as an inability to make the business replace his day job within a tight time frame (I think it was six months).

In other words, if he didn’t get exactly what he wanted, when he wanted it, his effort would be deemed a failure.

I shouldn’t be surprised anymore at the stories people tell themselves about failure and success, but I’m still constantly amazed at the weirdness of the human brain. Why would we construct a scenario in which only one outcome will satisfy us? Why would we set our sights on this specific apple on this specific tree (requiring ladders and specialized tree-climbing equipment) when we will encounter so many juicy apples along the way?

I’ll tell ya why (why I think we do it, anyway): We want to stay forever in the planning stage where things are hypothetical and perfect.

And if we don’t get the lead in the school play, we purchase a lottery ticket that’s not a winner, or we can’t get our book to Oprah, we don’t have to take further action. We can crawl back into our den of unblemished possibility without having to put in the work to become, as Cal Newport says, “so good they can’t ignore you.”

When we define success so narrowly that all of the powers of earth and heaven have to perfectly align and everyone we encounter has to say yes to us, we virtually ensure our failure. But it isn’t even a failure of our fledgling project. It’s a failure of our imagination. We can’t see that there are other paths branching out from this one: Other people to talk to, other ideas that will make our work better, and other things to try.

If success means only, “I get what I want, when I want it,” we won’t be willing or able to, as Seth Godin puts it, create the steady “drip, drip, drip” of sharing our work with the world so that we can gradually create the change we seek to make. What a shame if we decide not to try out for any more plays or teams, or refuse to make any more art, or decline to continue to pursue a business or nonprofit venture that could eventually have an impact. However, all of these things take work, and it’s easier (though less fun) to say, “Oh well! I guess I failed,” and skip all of that work.

As with many things, there are choices we might not see. It is a choice to use the word “failure” to describe a normal process of growing a business or learning a new skill. It is a choice to give oneself a deadline (“If I don’t make nationals this year, I’m quitting”), an arbitrary target (“We will cross the $10 million threshold!”), or compare ourselves to someone else (“Julia is on chapter 10, so I’ve got to get to chapter 11”). And it is a choice to feel bad if we are unable to then live up to our own weirdly specific standards.

If we shift our focus to the process instead of the outcome, we can enjoy the day-to-day progress that we see. Instead of trying to prove ourselves to someone else or live up to an external standard, we take our destiny in our own hands and relish the growth and development that is already happening. We see that we are already experiencing success, even if it’s only on a small scale.

For this to work, we have to actually be putting in the effort, every day. And when we do this, success is inevitable. It may not look exactly like we thought it would, but that’s part of the fun of it. There are so many ways to win that we can’t even see at the beginning. Success is not a tightrope we must walk, narrowly avoiding falling into failure; it’s a wide-open field where games are being played all the time. When we step off the tightrope, that’s where we land. Let’s take the leap.

Where are you afraid of failing? Is there a way to redefine success in order to improve your chances? How might this help you see how far you’ve already come?