On Failure
Updated: 5 days ago
I once sat with an athlete a few hours after the biggest competition of his career. For years, he had imagined how the day would unfold. He knew where his family would be sitting. He knew what he would say in post-match interviews. He had rehearsed the victory long before it arrived. Then he lost. Not dramatically. Not through bad luck or controversy. He simply wasn't good enough on the day. When he came into the room, he looked less disappointed than confused. "I don't know what to do now," he said.
At first, I assumed he meant the next competition. The next training session. The next goal. But that wasn't what he meant. The future he had been living towards had disappeared. And he didn't know who he was without it.
We tend to think of failure as an event not a process. A missed putt. A dropped catch. A poor performance review. A lost final. But in my experience, failure isn't really the thing that happened. Failure is the meaning we attach to what happened. Two athletes can experience exactly the same setback. One sees a temporary disappointment. The other sees proof that they were never good enough in the first place. The event is identical. The story is different. The suffering often lives inside the story.
Many of us develop an unusual relationship with failure early in life. Perhaps we were praised for achievement. Perhaps success became part of our identity. Perhaps being competent felt safer than being uncertain. Over time, performance and self-worth become entangled. And it is a well-worn story. Winning feels bigger than winning. Losing feels bigger than losing.
An exam result becomes a judgement of our intelligence. A selection decision becomes a verdict on our character. A poor performance becomes evidence of inadequacy. Failure stops being something that happened. It becomes something we are. Failure becomes a garment we wear; something only we we see.
Athletes encounter this problem with particular intensity. Sport has scoreboards. Rankings. Selection lists. Stopwatches. The world of sport constantly tells us where we stand. It has permanency of a sort. It can be difficult not to listen. Difficult not to convert outcomes into identity. When this happens, every performance becomes a referendum on who we are as people. This is a heavy burden for any result to carry. Much too heavy.
Several years ago, I worked with a golfer who played one of the best rounds of his season on a Thursday and one of the worst on a Friday. After the second round he was furious. He analysed every shot. Every decision. Every mistake. His conclusion was simple. "I've gone backwards." When we looked more closely, however, something else became apparent. His swing hadn't disappeared. His preparation hadn't changed. His commitment hadn't weakened. What had changed was the result. The moment the result changed, his entire view of himself changed with it. He treated performance as evidence of identity not feedback on a performance. A good score meant he was capable. A poor score meant he was flawed. No wonder failure felt unbearable.
The difficulty is that failure is unavoidable. Not occasionally. Inevitable. Every athlete loses eventually. Every coach makes mistakes. Every leader gets things wrong. Every ambitious person discovers that effort and outcome do not always move in tandem. If our psychological wellbeing depends upon avoiding failure, we are building our lives upon an impossible condition. On a highwire. Sooner or later reality will object. Perhaps the real task is not learning how to avoid failure. Perhaps it is learning how to meet it. To meet it with compassion and understanding. To see failure as information rather than indictment. As feedback rather than identity. As experience rather than evidence. This sounds simple. It rarely feels simple. When something matters deeply to us, disappointment hurts. It ought to hurt. Why? Because we are human. The absence of pain would suggest the absence of investment. The goal is not indifference. The goal is perspective.
The athlete I mentioned earlier eventually returned to competition. Not immediately. Not triumphantly. The process was slower than he wanted. Like most meaningful processes. Months later, he reflected on his loss differently. He didn't describe what he had learned about sport. He described what he had learned about himself. "I thought success would teach me about success," he said. "It turns out failure taught me more." I have thought about that sentence often. Not because failure is desirable. Few people would choose it. But because failure has a way of exposing assumptions we didn't know we were carrying. It reveals where we have attached our worth. It uncovers stories that success allows us to ignore. It asks difficult questions.
Who are you when things don't go well?
What remains when achievement disappears?
What aspects of you are untouched by the result?
These are uncomfortable questions. But they may also be important ones. Perhaps this is the strange gift hidden inside failure. It interrupts certainty. It dismantles illusions. It forces us to revise stories that no longer serve us. And while we would rarely welcome it at the time, failure often becomes one of life's most persistent teachers. Not because it tells us we are inadequate. But because it reminds us that we are more than our performance. The result matters. Just not as much as we think. And the person who walks away from failure is still there, waiting to be discovered.
When I read the last line, I'm left feeling sanguine (confident and inclined to hopefulness). And maybe that's truly what we want. Hope that we can realise that part of us that's desperate to reveal itself on the pitch, on the court, in the pool. Sport, at every level, offers us a chance to learn about ourselves. And when we do, we can face those demons we have stuffed into the corners of our lives. It's a chance to find out who we are. Perhaps that's all we need.
