Feeling Like a Failure
Failure happens to all of us.
If you liked reading this, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Thanks!
Personal Update! I recently announced Near Horizon, a new kind of early stage venture firm I co-founded last year. We invest in your company AND join your team, working alongside you to build your AI-driven business. As proven entrepreneurs, we do everything from coding and selling to experimenting and scaling. If you are a solo-founder working on an industry defining problem (or know someone who is) we would love to talk to you.
Life would be a lot easier if you could always win. The struggle can be rewarding, but there is nothing like the feeling of winning at the end of a long struggle. It would make it so much easier to slog through the worst parts of our struggles if we knew success was waiting at the end.
If you spend too much time on social media, you might believe that lots of people do nothing but win. If you read too many press releases, you might think every company is succeeding. If you believe your LinkedIn feed, everyone is getting promoted all the time. We all know it’s not true, but it definitely can feel that way.
Failure is a part of life. No one succeeds at everything they do, and many of us fail much more often than we succeed. Few of us talk about our failures publicly, but we love to brag about our successes. As a result, everything you read is about success! It’s all a highly curated selection of success, with the failure filtered out.
You cannot compare your reality to someone else’s fiction.
I talk to a lot of business leaders that lament that their peers are finding more success, faster. They look at announcements and see the path of companies reaching the heights of success, even if they started in the same place. It’s hard to have passion and energy if you think you’re constantly falling behind, or worse, running in place. This kind of thinking becomes a heavy burden to carry.
Of course, those same leaders aren’t reading about their peers that failed. There is rarely an announcement when a company fails, all of its assets liquidated. We read about the one or two successes, never seeing the hundreds and hundreds of failures.
Many of these leaders lamenting their lack of success are running businesses with strong fundamentals, but a few problems that need to be fixed. They are not losing, as much as they are not WINNING. I know plenty of other leaders that would love to run these businesses, as theirs has failed. The perception is entirely relative.
And, of course, sometimes these leaders are leading businesses that will fail. Sometimes they see failure coming, and sometimes it surprises them. It is really hard to see your business fail, and it never gets easier.
When true failure comes, it puts that false feeling of failure in perspective. You realize that feeling like you’re falling behind is not the same as failing. You can see through the social media, the press releases and all of the other hype. That pain of failure cuts through the mirage like a knife, giving you clarity.
I have often been complimented that I have a steady leadership style. I don’t get too excited with the wins, and never too down with the losses. That comes from how many times I’ve failed, and the sharp pain of failure that is always with me. It gives me clarity that is hard earned, and it still hurts, but it is clarifying.
So, if you feel like you are failing, take a hard look. Don’t compare your reality to their fiction, make sure you are looking at your situation objectively. See through the mirage.
When you do fail, it hurts. I have no words to help soften the blow, just know you are not alone. And that painful sting of failure will help you have clarity in the future.
It certainly has for me.
For more on Mental Health, see:
You scored that well.
The advice to avoid meaningless comparisons with others and calmly assess the situation when feeling like a failure was very helpful to me. Also, I really liked the illustration at the beginning, as it connects well with the one from the previous article.