Since Fuckup Nights originated in 2012, our message has always been the same: "failure sucks, but instructs." The pun works best when you say it in English: "Failure sucks, but instructs".

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In 10 years we have shed light on thousands of failures, under the spotlight and on stages all over the world so that people know the B-side of the professional world, what they don't tell us in movies and books. Because a lot has already been said about success.

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It's not that we're fans of failure either. As we said, failure, apart from teaching, sucks. It is uncomfortable, but inevitable and hence the importance of putting it on the table, it is part of our human experience. We could even say that it doesn't always teach, sometimes we just fail, there is nothing to learn, maybe just get used to it and deal with it.

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At our events we avoid closing our talks with success stories, we go into little depth because that is not our focus or our objective. You learn more from failure... Or do you?

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In our first decade of life, we wanted to explore this possibility. Is it also worthwhile to talk only about success? Do we learn as much as we learn from failure?

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The narrative of success

Success plays an important role in our lives. It represents hope, the reward for our efforts. After all, any task or journey we undertake is for a purpose, and setting goals and objectives helps us stay on track.

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Although we sometimes don't notice it, many of the success stories we hear do mention failure. Every narrative has conflict, and failure makes the achievement of success look more heroic. 

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However, in the academic and professional world, we tend to focus more on results than on processes, and when we tell success stories, we tend to omit important aspects of the story. What about the setbacks? How were they solved? What would we have done differently to avoid them?

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In the narrative of success, it is important to detail more the process than the final result, to give value to the aspects that made us grow as professionals and the valuable knowledge that the rocky process left us. And above all, share responsibly, avoiding "magic formulas for success".

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Biases and liability

Within a narrative there must be responsibility, both from the one who shares a story and from the one who listens to it.

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Our communication process involves personal biases and interpretations that can distort our reality and expectations regarding our own path.

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Self-interest bias is a common phenomenon when we tell a success story. We often attribute our failures to external situations and factors, rather than to our own decisions or attitudes. On the contrary, we relate success to our merits, abilities and values, excluding external situations that also play an important role.

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Even if we are successful, it is important to reflect on what things led to our success: Was it really only because of my abilities? What external situations influenced us for better or for worse?

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On the other side of the communication spectrum, when we decide to undertake or pursue a goal, we tend to have survivor bias. We often choose to focus on success stories that worked, ignoring those that failed.

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Surely you know someone who starts their business because they know of an extraordinary success story, or because they heard that it is a good idea to start a business in a certain industry. In those cases, we go for the most encouraging sounding scenario, and leave aside other more rational and objective factors.

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This is why responsibility is very necessary when we share our experiences and also when we listen to them. Replicating successful models should always be done with caution.

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Expectations

When we hear success stories, it is very easy to grow our expectations of ourselves from them. Unless you are a very pessimistic person, this is not the case with stories of failure.

Expectations are simply thoughts and beliefs about what will happen. However, reality can turn out to be different. This disparity between expectation and reality can be harsh, generate unhappiness, stress and exaggerate our vision and fear of failure.

It is important, as consumers of success stories, to evaluate our expectations from time to time in order to be more careful about what they generate for us:

Question your expectations: Where do they come from, are they realistic? When your expectations are compromised, analyze whether they were compromised in the first place.

Practice gratitude: When our expectations are not met, exercising gratitude makes us appreciate more the good things we have, generate positive feelings and a better attitude.

Don't make comparisons: Even though it may seem like everyone seems to be successful, many times people omit the complicated parts. Don't compare yourself, success (and failure) is different for everyone.

It is normal to experience disappointments as a result of our expectations. And as much as we take care of what we listen to and where we get our inspiration from, it is important to recognize our emotions and value what really makes us happy from the beginning.

Generally, we assimilate positive experiences differently than negative ones. The latter require more mental processes and the information is processed more thoroughly than the positive ones. We believe that listening to other people's stories of failure is a safe way to experience and learn. Doing it with humor and removing value judgments towards failure, becomes an even more enriching experience.

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Although the success stories omit the vulnerability factor and sometimes appeal to personal ego...

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No, it is not a bad thing to share success stories, it is valuable if done honestly and responsibly. It can exercise our resilience, help us set goals and have control over our expectations. However we stick with the path of failure, after all, it's more like rockstars to fall in style and learn in the process.

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With our Failure Program we designed a series of courses and workshops to identify and question what it means to fail. With this we seek to help our clients improve their corporate culture and their decision making processes. Decisions free of prejudices and more appropriate to the human needs of those who make up their organizations.

Schedule a call with us to find out how we can help you do the same.

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