How To Be An Awesome Failure

By Carly Jacobs

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es. You read the heading of this article correctly. It is totally possible to be awesome at not being awesome. Hear me out.

Winning is brilliant. It feels good, it makes people like you and depending on what you win you’ll probably get some cool stuff like a trophy, or money or a meat tray. Winning is the best. This is where we tricky little humans get into trouble. We know how lovely winning is so we try our hardest to avoid the opposite of that – losing or failing. For example we naturally swerve to avoid things in the street we don’t enjoy like dog poo, pot holes and people who look like they’re about to spew and this tendency stretches to include an avoidance of failure.

There are five main ways in which we try to avoid failure. You might be a connoisseur of one particular method or you might like to mix up a little but it’s important to identify how we avoid losing so we can can rectify it and learn how to be an awesome failure. We avoid failing by…

Doing all the things

Some people do too much stuff to avoid failure. If a person is ‘too busy’ to complete a task or a goal, it glorifies the failure and gives the goal setter a little ego boost.

Never starting anything 

Another popular way to avoid failure is never do anything in the first place. If you never try, you can’t fail.

Flogging a dead horse 

This is usually considered an admirable trait in a person but horse floggers will often find themselves in dead end jobs, with dead end partners, chasing dead end dreams because as long as they’re still doing the thing, they haven’t failed at it.

Ignoring it 

Typical ignorers of failure will end relationships without actually ending them and pretend like they never even signed up to courses that they stopped attending months ago. If they don’t aknowledge the failure, it never happened.

Sucking at everything on purpose  

Popular amongst but not exclusive to teenagers, sucking at everything on purpose is another excellent way to avoid failure. If the aim is to fail, is softens the blow when that inevitably happens.

I think most of us are guilty of almost all of these, the good news is that the solution to all of these problems is the same.

You need to fail quickly. It’s as simple as that.

If something isn’t working and you can recognise that it’s not fixable, you need to kill it immediately. If you have a business that’s not working, a friendship that’s more trouble than it’s worth or an exercise routine that’s making you miserable, it’s time to let it go and fail fast. Just do it. You’re literally wasting time ignoring the horse, flogging the horse after it’s died, never riding the horse in the first place, riding too many horses at once or riding your horse badly on purpose.

Ride the horse quickly and if you hate it, get off. Be an awesome failure.

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How do you like to avoid failure? Personally I like to flog a dead horse…

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About Carly Jacobs

Carly is the founding editor of Smaggle which launched in 2007 back when blogging was weird. She has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Cosmopolitan and Cleo magazines. Hoop earrings are totally her thing and she almost got run over by Myf Warhurst while out jogging one day.

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