Did you know that "failure" isn't real? How cool is that?
Mary Schiller argues that failure is a label we apply, not an actual outcome. She uses a chemistry experiment to show how results are neutral until we judge them, then shares how reframing her abusive marriage and career struggles as experiences rather than failures let her rebuild her life in Paris.
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Hello, hello, it's Mary Schiller, author and coach of MarySchiller.com, coming to you from my cozy apartment here in Paris, France. It was so nice when I went out earlier today, and I was just about to go out and film this outside, and of course it started pouring rain. And also, they're doing some construction work on the building next door, so I apologize if you can hear that in the background. I wanted to chat with you for a few minutes today about failure. And this topic is very interesting to me right now because I have for the last, oh, maybe year, year and a half, been working and coaching, working with and coaching people who are trying to start their own businesses. Most of them are trying to jumpstart a coaching practice. And so oftentimes what I hear are things like, you know, what if I do X and Y doesn't happen? You know, what if I try this and it fails? Or what if this business doesn't work? Then what will happen? You know, what if this is another failure, et cetera, et cetera. And I hear the word failure a lot. I hear phrases, what if it doesn't work? A lot, and I just find it fascinating because failure isn't real. There is no such thing as failure. I'll give you an example that I was remembering a few moments ago from when I was in high school. I had this kind of quirky chemistry teacher, and I remember very distinctly I was conducting an experiment, and I thought I was following all of the steps the way that they were laid out. But when I got to the end of the experiment, my result was different from what was supposed to happen. And so I called the teacher over and I said, you know, I'm not sure exactly what I did wrong, but I got a different result from— hi, Sarah— from what it says in the book. And so clearly I failed this experiment. And he looked at me quite puzzled and said, "There's no such thing as a failure in chemistry." He said, "It's that you just did something different, and this was the result of whatever chemicals you put together. So as long as you can retrace your steps and explain why you got this particular result, that's all that I care about." He says there's no such thing as failure as long as you can kind of see what happened that might have led to this end product. And I've always remembered that because, you know, we have this notion that we know exactly how something is supposed to turn out. You know, we come up with an idea, let's say it relates to business, and we have this idea that we, you know, want to make X amount of money by X date and we want to have this many clients and we want to do it by following these particular steps, etc., etc. And we have this whole kind of story that we have played out in our minds, supposedly kind of predicting all of the steps in the future that are going to lead to that result. And when some or none of those things occur in that way, we can look at ourselves and go, well, that was a failure. Instead of realizing that things simply occur. We take a step in a certain direction towards something that we would like to create, let's say it's a business or something, and we see what happens. And then we take the next step and see what happens then. I often think about people who have invented amazing things, and I know for a fact that everything that they did, when they saw the result of it, They simply took the next step after that that looked logical to them to try to see if they could then create the thing that they were trying to create. So I'm wondering what your life would look like if you realized that failure isn't real and that failure is more like you having some kind of made-up expectation-type thinking that you see as truth that isn't, it's made up in your mind. And when that thing doesn't occur, then you label it as a failure or you label yourself even worse as a failure. So I'm really curious to know what might change for you if you saw that failure isn't real? What would you go do in your life if you weren't constantly paying attention to expectation-type thinking, to what-if, you know, scary what-if type thinking, and instead made that more playful what-if. Well, what if I tried this? Or what if, I wonder if I could, you know, fill in the blank. And had more fun and more play and joy around trying new things and going and doing things instead of looking at everything as a failure. And let me explain something here that might be important for you to know. I saw my entire adult life up until a few years ago as a failure in just about every single area. My professional life, my personal life, my relationships, uh, just myself. My whole life looked like one tragic failure. And it looked like the only way that I could even possibly begin to correct that failure was if I could hop into some kind of time machine and go backwards and make a different decision and not marry the person that I married, my first husband, when I was 22. That looks like the way out of that failure, which is to say there was no way out. The way that I was seeing things. And when I realized a couple years ago that actually failure isn't real, I was able to very calmly look back at my life experiences and go, well, yeah, you know, I did one thing and that led me to do another thing and that led me to do another thing and a lot of stuff happened, but there's no failure in there. It's just not possible. Because things occur, simply things occur. Just like in the chemistry experiment, I put the chemicals together in a certain way that was different from what the book stated, but something else occurred. That didn't mean that I failed. It simply meant that something else occurred, something different occurred from what I was expecting. So I would love for you to contemplate this today. That if failure isn't real, what would you want to go do with your life? Hi, Simone, thank you. What would you do now that you've been scared to do if you knew not just that you couldn't fail, but the whole idea of failing is fake? For me, it's been incredibly freeing to realize that failure doesn't exist. It's allowed me to take steps to make this move to Paris. I had no expectation as to whether that would happen. It simply seemed like a wonderful thing to try to do. It has allowed me to create this really fun and exciting business that has given me all the flexibility I need to live here, to do what I want, to work with the people that I enjoy working with. All of those things have come about because I realized that it wasn't just true that I couldn't fail, but failing was not real, that it was simply a made-up idea that I'd been looking at as real. So somebody might look at me and say, well, how could you not say that that first marriage was a failure? You know, it was an abusive relationship and just, you know, in all ways it looks like a disaster. And I just don't see it that way anymore. I see all of that time in my life with— through a lens of— hi, is it Ema? Thank you. I see all of that through the lens of appreciation, through the lens of love for myself, through the lens of understanding that I was simply responding to what looked correct to me at the time. And I don't see my life as a big fat failure anymore. And to say that that has changed things would be the understatement of the century. So as you go through the rest of this week, contemplate what that would mean to you if you saw that failure wasn't, isn't real. Even just a little glimpse of that. What would that allow you to do? What would you like to do that you haven't been doing because you were afraid to fail? Oh, thank you so much. I love that. Hi Shirley, nice to see you. So please feel free to comment on this video, uh, whenever and wherever you happen to be watching it. I would love to hear from you, and enjoy the rest of your day. I'll talk to you again very soon. Bye for now.
