No success like failure

A rather more palatable reality is that we can learn from our mistakes, and so are able to benefit from them. Megan McArdle has taken this dependable universal truth and unravelled its various real-life applications. She’s done a good job too. This study has depth, variety and offers entertaining, engaging reading.

Although charmingly self-effacing, the author has attained  lofty heights in her career, usually – as she herself explains here – by learning from her mistakes.

McArdle is a columnist for Bloomberg, a blogger for the Daily Beast and has stints at The Economist, Atlantic magazine, and Newsweek on her CV. She has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Time and other venerable publications on both sides of the Atlantic. In other words she’s no parochial author of sugary self-help guides, an impression conveyed by this book’s title.

McArdle challenges our view of painful failures, suggesting they are actually powerful springboards to success. We must  learn the lessons they offer faster. In short, we must learn to “fail a little better”.

The advice applies to individuals, companies, even whole economies: there is no growth or progress without failure.

McArdle makes her case with studies drawn from business, medicine, psychology, education and other fields. Indeed, she serves up a delicious smorgasbord of failure in its many piquant varieties.

An autobiographical thread runs through the book, with McArdle relating the rocky path of her own professional life. Passages about “deep soul-crushing periods of misery following stupid mistakes” that imprisoned her “in a fog of anxiety and regret” are moving.

But the attractive face that stares from her Daily Beast photo-byline makes her vale of tears sound like a bit of stretch. Being blessed in the looks department mitigates a great deal of potential for “failure”, studies have repeatedly shown.

In any event, McArdle makes her point well.

She shows how childhood self-perception often affects the adults we become. In a study of two groups of children given the same simple task to fulfil, one group was acclaimed for being “very smart”, while the other half were praised for “working very hard”. When the same groups were given a choice between another easy task or a more challenging one, the hard workers always chose the challenge, while the “smart” ones invariably chose the easier option. The message here is that “success” can act as a de-motivator. 

Switching her focus from the individual, McArdle turns to governmental and corporate failures and their lessons, such as the disastrous marketing campaign for “New Coke” in 1985 and the more recent government bail-out of General Motors.

One of the most powerful chapters in the book discusses the scourge of long-term unemployment in the West. McArdle empathises with the millions who have been unemployed for longer than a year, likening their plight to being trapped in a dark room where anxiety prevents them from finding the exit. The “escapees” are the ones who keep moving, pursuing multiple opportunities, hoping and praying that one will pay off.

Having diagnosed the syndrome, the author offers sound and practical advice for unemployed job-seekers.

McArdle engages the reader with warmth and verve, and this uplifting book reminds us that it’s okay to fail sometimes – and that it’s also inevitable. The important thing is to realise that failure is never terminal as long as you learn from it.

The “Up Side Of Down” is a fine and instructive read for job-hunters, CEOs, pop-psychology fans and just about everyone in between.

 

 

 

 

The Up Side Of Down: Why Failing Well Is The Key To Success

By Megan McArdle

Published by Viking

Available at major bookshops, Bt956 

Reviewed by Nick Walker