On Failebrations
I’m a month or so into reversing a whole bunch of weight gain and related lying to myself about my health. It’s been a rocky start: along with the typical post honeymoon period backsliding, two separate trips have threatened to derail my efforts. After declaring rock bottom for my health it’s only taken this long to see the behaviors that got me there in the first place start to creep back in.
But maybe that’s just part of the journey.
Consistency.
“What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?” I asked. “What do the really successful people do that most don’t?”
He mentioned the factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over”.
— James Clear, “Atomic Habits”
Clearly consistency over the long term is the way to win whatever game we engage in. In this case the game is my way of being healthy - eating, drinking, sleeping, exercising, and so on. But the inevitable obstacles that pop up along the way often get me off track. While I understand the above quote from Atomic Habits I think that those people’s biggest superpower was that they were able to keep moving forward in the face of adversity.
Failing.
Our ability to recover from failure goes hand in hand with consistency. Our minds are built to extrapolate from the current state of things: in the same way a success has us predicting more of the same tomorrow, a failure has us immediately wondering how we’ll ever recover. The steps we take surrounding a failure - how we frame it - are the difference between dusting off and moving forward with the plan of record or joining countless others in the tradition of falling off the wagon.
I love Giannis Antetokounmpo’s response to a reporter’s question about whether he considered the season a failure after the Bucks bowed out of the NBA playoffs: "It's not a failure, it's steps to success. There's always steps to it. Michael Jordan played for 15 years and won 6 championships. The other 9 years were a failure?". It’s worth watching the whole thing:
Failebrations.
On our walk this morning Minette unintentionally blended ‘failure’ and ‘celebration’ into ‘failebration’ and I think it’s brilliant. I see that it’s been used before in the context of Agile software testing which is the perfect place for it. We should celebrate when testing causes software to fail as it means one less defect escapes into production. It also works in the context of failures in our personal habits as they are opportunities to reflect on what’s gone wrong and to remember that the path to success is rocky.
SpaceX’s rocket programs are a fantastic example of what’s called ‘iterative development’. A recent spectacular failure in the first flight of their Starship rocket was met by applause from the engineering team back in Hawthorne, CA: they expect things to go wrong and acknowledge it as part of their process. The only inexcusable failure for them would be to not gather any data from the event. Sure, it’s painful to blow up the pad and lose an expensive piece of equipment. But learning from it is the fastest way to make a better one.
A failebration is not:
a free pass for giving in to an addiction or giving up on our version of sobriety
a participation trophy
permission to not keep trying
a way to forget about failure
a chance to self-flagellate
A failebration is:
time spent learning and reflecting on a failure, how it came about, what steps we can take to prevent it in the future
an acceptance of this failure as just a step to success (see Giannis’ quote above)
the uplift and reinforcement that can only come from falling down and getting up again
a chance to practice self-compassion
I’d like to build failebrations into my goal progress going forward. Throughout my life I’ve been pretty hard on myself when I make mistakes. Practicing self-compassion in those times is in close alignment with what I learned from the Procrastination book. This celebration in the face of failure can only improve my resiliency while also serving as a tool to point me back in the right direction.