Failure is Failure

The Bar is Loaded, Pt. 4: Why the right ratio of failure to success is critical for progress.

The crisp winter sunrise was a pleasant backdrop for my drive to this particular customer meeting. Not my first meeting on my own, but it was the first time I was intending to train a customer on one of my company’s programs. I’d done my pre-call planning, I’d spent time going over the program with several colleagues, and I felt entirely prepared. That is, until about two minutes in, and I realized I actually didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did.

Have you ever been there? You did the work, you showed up, you were so confident you had what it took to succeed, and yet, it wasn’t enough? There are few things more disappointing than overestimating our own abilities, especially when other people are there to witness our failure.

This is not another post about how “failure is awesome because we can get back up again and it shows us how strong we are.” While I can appreciate the sentiment of that advice, I think it’s an impartial picture. As we’ve been doing the last few weeks, we’ll draw on what I’ve learned from my powerlifting hobby to see what failure can do (and not do) for us.

Failure reveals what we don’t yet know

At my very first powerlifting meet, I failed my third bench attempt, and I was pretty bummed. A meet is structured such that each lifter gets three attempts at each of the three lifts; typically the first and second attempts are weights that you’ve done before, and the third lift is where you aim for a new PR. The tricky part is estimating what that third attempt should be; ultimately, you don’t truly know if you can lift that weight until the bar is in your hands. Aside from getting stronger, one of the biggest success factors for a powerlifter is how well you can predict what you can handle.

Going in to my first meet, I thought I knew how much I could handle on bench press; as it turns out, I overestimated myself. Yet, when it came to deadlifts, my third attempt was so easy that I definitely could have added more weight and still been successful. This is all a testament to the fact that, as a new powerlifter, I didn’t know myself very well. And here is the lesson: in order to know what we can handle, sometimes we have to try something we can’t.

When I attempted to teach that customer about our program, I truly thought I could handle it. The only thing that would show me I didn’t actually know yet what I needed to know is trying and failing. In the meeting, I failed. I had to call up a colleague and have him walk the customer through it instead. It was not my proudest moment, yet I learned the questions I should have been asking before going in to a meeting like that. Had I not attempted it, I’d probably still be stuck in the delusion of thinking I knew everything I needed to know about the program. In this case, failure taught me what I still needed to learn.

Failure reveals what we aren’t executing properly

At my next powerlifting meet, I failed my final squat attempt. I was more upset about this failure than my first bench failure at the previous meet; this time around, I was pretty confident I should have been able to hit the weight. In fact, it was even a fairly conservative third attempt. What happened this time? As I watched the video later, it seems as though I rushed my setup and lost some control over the bar in my descent as a result. Sometimes, failure shows us what we aren’t paying attention to. I overlooked just how important it was to slow down at the beginning of my lift, and it cost me the attempt.

Have you found yourself attempting something you know you can do, perhaps you’ve even done it in the past, but it still turns out a flop? Maybe you got too confident and didn’t prepare as much as you should have, or you forgot a critical aspect of what it took to succeed from the last time. Either way, the failure is a painful reminder of what we know, but didn’t take time to execute well.

If failure teaches us these things, and these are valuable things, does it mean we need to go out there and aim to fail all the time? Certainly not. There’s probably a scientifically-proven ratio of wins to losses that keep us motivated to improve without destroying our morale, but it’s not as though we can always plan it out. Instead, there are a couple principles I think we can use as a litmus test for if we’re challenging ourselves enough.

1) Is there an area of your life where you have never, ever failed?

Odds are, you’re not challenging yourself enough. A powerlifter’s goal is always to “go 9 for 9” (successfully make all three attempts of all three lifts); yet, if every meet is a 9/9 meet, we’re probably not actually on the edge of what we’re capable of and we need to push a little bit more. It might mean we go 7/9 or 8/9, but then we learn more about what it feels like to fail and how we can become more accurate at predicting what we can handle. Maybe for you, it’s in running for student leadership positions, and you’ve never ran for something you thought you wouldn’t win. Now is the time to take a risk and stop limiting yourself just to protect your ego.

2) On the flip side, is there an area where it seems like you just keep failing?

For you, it might be time to dial down the intensity. Don’t quit, but see where you can take things back to square one and rebuild. Maybe you’re training for a 5K and you just can’t seem to improve your speed; what about finding a coach or a friend with running skills who can help you build the foundation of proper warm-up routines and variation drills to help you get faster?

3) When you finish a task, did you feel challenged?

Not everything in our life needs to be the hardest thing we’ve ever done; yet, if nothing is testing the edge of our capabilities, we’ll always be selling ourselves short. If you never feel challenged, it’s time to ramp up the weight on the bar. If you’re always overwhelmed with the mountain ahead of you, it might be time to take a few plates off the bar.

4) Are you getting better?

Powerlifters measure their success in a variety of ways, but the most universal is this: did you lift more weight (either on a specific lift, or in total) at this meet than you did at the last one? If they fail every third attempt because they’re trying to add too much to their total, they probably will be disappointed. If they make all the same attempts as the last meet just to be sure they’ll be successful, they’ll also be disappointed. If we’re not getting better, we should check if we’ve failed recently.

If you’re challenging yourself at the right level, and often enough, you will see improvement. If you’re winning all the time, you won’t learn your weaknesses as well. If you’re losing all the time, it will be hard to stay motivated. Our goal should be to aim for the sweet spot: win often enough to keep going, and fail often enough to know how to win better the next time.

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Journal Prompt of the Week

How did you answer each of the four questions above? Are you failing enough, or too much? What will you do about it?