FAILOSOPHY EB

Elizabeth Day

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780008420383, 9780008432195
• eBook ISBN: 9780008420390
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of How to Fail and Magpie

'Elizabeth Day has revolutionised the way we see failure' Stylist

'A beautiful timely and humane book' Alain de Botton

'Most failures can teach us something meaningful about ourselves if we choose to listen'

In Failosophy Elizabeth Day brings together all the lessons she has learned, from conversations with the guests on her award-winning How to Fail podcast, from stories shared with her by readers and listeners, and from her own life, and distils them into seven principles of failure.

Practical, reassuring and inspirational, these principles offer a guide through life's rough patches. From failed exams to romantic break-ups, from career setbacks to confidence crises, from navigating anxiety to surviving loss, Failosophy recognises, and celebrates, the fact that failure connects us all. It is what makes us human.

With insights from Malcolm Gladwell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lemn Sissay, Frankie Bridge, Nigel Slater, Emeli Sande, Alain de Botton, Mabel, Fearne Cotton, Meera Syal, Dame Kelly Holmes, Andrew Scott and many, many more, Failosophy is the essential handbook for turning failure into success.

The Seven Failure Principles

‘You don’t have to be the best, just try your best’

MABEL, POP STAR

‘The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling a story from the same facts’

ALAIN DE BOTTON, PHILOSOPHER

After a few months of recording and editing podcast episodes, I began to realise there were certain recurring themes that kept cropping up and certain pieces of advice or insight that I would hear and think, ‘Wow, that’s so helpful. I’ll have to write that down.’

At first, I thought there were five Failure Principles, but as time went on, I realised there were actually seven. Ask me in a couple of years, and there will probably be 21, but for now, these seem fairly comprehensive.

1. Failure just is

This might sound obvious. Bear with me.

The first failure principle starts with acknowledging that failure is a fact. It exists. Like oxygen. You can’t wish oxygen away or live your life trying to avoid it because that would be stupid and impossible. Oxygen is integral to our survival and so, in its own way, is failure. Failure gives us the opportunity to learn, if we choose to let it. You have to make the mistake in order to solve the problem.

Failure has happened to all of us and it will continue to happen to all of us at various points in our life. Once you realise this, it becomes a great leveller. There is nothing at all, on this whole, wide, unique, fertile planet that can insulate us from failure forever. There just isn’t. Wishing it were otherwise is like wishing away oxygen. Or anything else that exists as a fact: teabags, for instance, or shoelaces. There’s no point living your life in fear of teabags or shoelaces, just as there is no point living your life in fear of failure.

Failure is a fact. The emotion we attach to it is separate and, to a greater or lesser extent, within our control.

Failure is also not what other people tell you it is. Your experience of failure is personal. As much as possible, it should exist separately from the judgement of others. Other people’s perceptions are skewed by their own emotional, cultural, familial and professional baggage and are not always going to be the best marker of how you should live your life. As difficult as that sounds, in this age of aggregating likes and double-taps, try as much as possible to untangle your feelings about failure from anyone else’s assessment of it.

‘The fact of worrying about whether it’s all going wrong is pointless. What it should be about is just thinking, “Well, all I can do is the best I can do, in the way I think is the best way, and we’ll see what happens at the end” … Failure is part of the process of getting where you need to be’

– ANDY MCNAB, AUTHOR AND FORMER SAS SOLDIER

I was taught to observe failure by Haemin Sunim, a South Korean Buddhist ‘mega-monk’ (he’s referred to as a ‘mega-monk’ because he has over a million followers on Twitter and the Guardian decided to call him that in a headline). As a mega-monk, Sunim is one of the most influential Zen Buddhist teachers in the world. His name means ‘nimble wisdom’.

When I met him in January 2019 at his publisher’s office in central London to record the podcast, he struck me as someone who was uninterested in small talk. He was dressed in unassuming monastic garb: a modest quilted grey overcoat worn belted around some equally modest grey trousers, and he seemed so self-contained that my inconsequential chatter about the weather felt embarrassingly over the top. I was trying so hard to break the ice, I hadn’t realised there was no ice to be broken. I didn’t need to try. I could just be.

‘It took me a long time to realise that I can’t change other people. And I can’t actually control other people. I don’t control what they do. I can only control myself’

– TARA WESTOVER, AUTHOR

Still, for the first few questions after I started recording with Sunim, I panicked. He left such long pauses before answering that I worried he had taken offence at something I’d said or simply wasn’t going to answer at all. Then, when he did speak, he would do so with such concision that I rapidly found myself burning through all my pre-prepared questions and running out of things to ask. He felt no need to fill a silence.

‘The minute you let go of the fear of failure, you score more’

– ENIOLA ALUKO, FORMER ENGLAND WOMEN’S FOOTBALLER

After a while, I got used to his rhythm. It was calming. My internal neurotic chatter began to quieten itself. What he was doing, I now realise, was allowing space for us both to contemplate what had just been said and what was about to be said. We were observing before we were reacting.

This, said Sunim, was the key to greater understanding. The whole point of meditation, he told me, was ‘to become aware of what’s happening in your mind. It is not to get somewhere, [to] some kind of peaceful inner state. Rather, it is whether you can become aware of what is really happening in your mind, clearly. That is precisely what you’re supposed to do.’

So, I asked, is the next step to observe that but not to attach emotion to it?

‘Right,’ he said. ‘If you are attaching some emotion or expectation then you become mindful [of that]: “Oh, I’m expecting something wonderful to happen. But it’s not happening. I feel like a failure.”’

The key to meditation, he continued, is ‘to see yourself objectively in a non-judgemental way: that’s the meditation.’

‘Putting my failures down on paper, or even talking about them – it doesn’t banish them. They’re still there. But it makes me realise that it wasn’t the end of the world and, if anything, possibly some good has come out of it’

– NIGEL SLATER, COOK AND AUTHOR

It’s the same thing, I believe, with failure. The key is to start by seeing it objectively, in a non-judgemental, un-fearful way. It is to contemplate the fact of it before attaching any kind of feeling to your perception of it. Perceptions and feelings can often be warped and unhelpful. They can arise from panic, grief, disappointment and internal criticism. In a time of crisis, they are often not the best or most reliable measure of what is actually happening. These negative feelings will sometimes give us the wrong advice because they are automatic reflexes, hardwired in us from past experiences that might no longer be relevant to our current situation. Often, we feel we have to resist what is happening, to chafe against it and pretend it isn’t so. But this never works.

‘Whenever we feel very unhappy it is because we are resisting what is,’ Sunim continued. ‘Whenever we resist what is, then of course we’ll feel very unhappy. The trick is how do we turn our mind and then try to accept the thing as it is?

‘We will fail. The question is whether we can fail gracefully and also whether we can learn something from that experience.’

‘Success is a personal perception’

– JESSIE BURTON, AUTHOR

Sunim taught me that instead of being tortured by the feelings you have around failure, the simple act of observation is a form of meditation. Who is it doing the observing, Sunim asked? It is you, he concluded, a separate being that can observe your emotions rather than be consumed by them. And it is you – that essential, enlightened, observational being – who is in control of what happens next.

2. You are not your worst thoughts

If we exist separately from our thoughts, the impact of this is seismic. Imagine switching off all of your thoughts, one by one – the worry about having left the oven on this morning; the concern about whether your child is doing well enough at school; the nagging feeling that you should have called your mother; the decision about what you’re going to have for dinner – would you still exist?

The answer is yes. If we turn off our thoughts, there is still an ‘us’ there.

In the past, I used to set great store by external markers of success: getting good exam results and job promotions. In this manner, I believed I would prove myself worthy of love and approval. It was my way, I suppose, of shoring up a lack of self-esteem.

I thought that if I did everything right, no one would ever be able to dislike me for having done something wrong. And if no one else disliked me, I couldn’t logically dislike myself. Doing things well was, I thought, necessary proof of my existence. It was the price I paid for admission into the theme park called life.

Yet it never seemed to work. The thrill that a good result or job appraisal gave me was temporary. It didn’t protect me from heartache or loss or abandonment or being terrible at team sports. It didn’t protect me from the failure I was trying so hard to avoid. It didn’t make me feel that much stronger or more certain about who I was. Instead, all it did was to confuse who I was with the things I did.

Gradually, I learned that intellectual box-ticking is often an external response to an internal lack. I began to realise that if I never achieved anything outwardly ever again, I would still exist. The voice in my head is not who I am. Rather, as Sunim had taught me, I am the one capable of observing it.

‘I think every human being has the inalienable right to live and decide what rules work for them’

– JAMES FREY, AUTHOR

Once we deconstruct the external idea of self – those projections that are reflected back on us by the demands and the expectations of the outside world – we are left with an internal self that requires nothing extra in order to be. Its presence is enough.

And here’s the best bit: the act of simply being connects us to others in a fundamental way because we are no longer disguising ourselves in the continuous effort to be ‘better’ than we really are. We aren’t pretending. We are our authentic, congruent, integrity-filled selves, where our internal and our external aspects are one and the same. That makes us more comfortable to be around. Instead of being the guest at a party who is constantly attempting to one-up the other invitees, we can be the person who is at peace with who they are and doesn’t have to show off to be thought worthy. Who wouldn’t rather be that dude?

That’s the theory, at least. Putting it into practice is harder.

This is where Mo Gawdat comes in. Gawdat is the former chief business officer of Google X, the so-called moonshot factory where they invent apparently crazy ideas like a balloon-powered internet. He is also one of my most downloaded podcast guests of all time. His interview aired in April 2019 and at almost every event I’ve spoken at since, at least one person will tell me that ‘the Mo Gawdat episode changed my life’. I know what they mean. It changed mine too.

When Gawdat came on How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, he talked about his firmly held belief that everyone could be happy if they chose to be. He based this on his own experiences. In his late thirties, on paper Gawdat had everything he could have desired: a flourishing career, money, a loving wife, two wonderful children and a taste for expensive cars.

‘I took being perfect so, so seriously because I couldn’t trust myself to still love myself if I made a mistake’

– CAMILLA THURLOW, CAMPAIGNER AND FORMER REALITY TV CONTESTANT

‘I bought Rolls-Royces,’ he told me. ‘There was a time where my garage had 16 cars in it. You would buy one, you would sit in it, you would feel a jolt of happiness for around 60 seconds, then you start to drive and what do you see? You see the road. You hear a little jiggle on the side of the car and you just, again, go, “That’s not the right one. Maybe another one is going to make me happy.”’

Despite his material wealth and his family life, Gawdat was unhappy. No matter how many cars he bought, he was still depressed. And so, like the engineer he was, he decided to approach his unhappiness as a scientific problem. For 12 years, he applied all his analytical skill into devising a solution. The result was an equation for happiness, outlined in his international bestseller, Solve for Happy.

The equation states simply that happiness is greater than or equal to your perception of the events in your life minus your expectation of how life should be. Essentially, if you expect nothing, you can’t be disappointed. Whereas if you expect too much, you’ll always feel dissatisfied.

To put this theory into practice, Gawdat said, you had to accept that your brain is an organ you have the ability to control. Your thoughts are a biological product of your brain in much the same way that the blood pumped around your body is a biological product of your heart. You are not your blood. You are also not your thoughts. So it is entirely reasonable for you to stop your brain getting carried away with the panicked, anxious responses it uses to deal with confusion.

Don’t get me wrong. Our brains are sophisticated and useful things when they’re offering up solutions based on thinking that’s insightful (‘should we look at this differently?’) or experiential (‘what do I know of the world that will help?’). Our brains are less helpful when they get stuck on a loop of incessant chatter because we’re stressed and over-adrenalised after our eighth cup of coffee in as many hours. In these situations, our brain can sometimes misread the panicked signals our body is sending it as more threatening than they actually are.

Gawdat gave the example of when he’d had an argument with his daughter, Aya. Afterwards, he found himself walking away ‘and the first thing that comes to my brain is, “Aya doesn’t love you any more.” I literally stopped in the middle of the street and said, “What did you just say? How can you come up with that pain? Where did that come from, brain? Why are you telling me this? Do you have evidence for what you’re telling me?” Basically, is your brain really that reliable if you let it loose? Or does it take us to places that make us unhappy and make us suffer for no reason whatsoever?’

Gawdat believes that, if you are neurologically healthy and of sound mind, you can train your brain to think more positively. You can ask it to take a negative thought and replace it with a positive one; it’s simply a matter of practising.

‘You tell your brain to raise your left hand. Have you ever had your brain come back to you and say, “Oh no, no, no. I’d prefer to raise my left foot”? No,’ he continued, ‘your brain does what you tell it to do.

‘Now, here’s the trick. I call my brain Becky, OK? – if you have a friend in school, Becky, who was so annoying that she showed up every seven minutes, told you awful things about yourself, made y...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• What Is Failure?
• The Seven Failure Principles
• Conclusion
• Addendum: A Catalogue of Failure
• Also by Elizabeth Day
• About the Author
• About the Publisher