If at first you don’t succeed, then try to see there’s nothing wrong with failure

IN many respects, we live in an all-or-nothing society. A child at a fiercely competitive school may do perfectly well, but feel like a failure if they don’t get the dozen top grades at GCSE attained by some of their peers. An athlete who never manages at gold medal at any international competition but has won plenty of silvers and consistently bettered his/her performance, might end up as only a footnote in sporting history, despite years in the pack with and respected by the top performers in an elite field.

The Italian football team that took on Spain in the final of Euro 2012 were not expected to get that far, after the torrid times both Italian domestic leagues and the national side had experienced in recent years. They exceeded expectations, and were then given a good pasting by Spain, having been forced to play with 10 men in the second half of the match.

The more technically skilled, tenacious and uniformly brilliant team won, but we should remember that in the great scheme of European football, getting to the last two was a terrific achievement for Italy. But no-one cares about that. Spain succeeded and Italy failed – cut and dried, black and white, all or nothing.

It’s one thing being judged by others, but more important is how you consider yourself. History may be quick to consign Andy Murray to the dustbin of heroic British sporting failures if he never fulfils his promise and wins a Grand Slam – but will that be how he views himself – always the bridesmaid, forever the also-ran, despite reaching the finals of several top tournaments, and having consistently appeared in the quartet of top-ranked players in world tennis? It takes a strong character, you suspect, to avoid contamination from a view projected upon you that you never quite cut it.

History is littered with references to failure, from politicians, entrepreneurs, athletes and philosophers. Winston Churchill said “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm,” and top NBA basketball player Michael Jordan famously commented “I can accept failure; everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”

Inspirational speaker and businessman Tony Robbins enigmatically said: “There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.” American novelist Ernest Hemingway, not content with critical and commercial success in his lifetime, said: “Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?”

Colin Feltham went looking for answers to the question of what we mean by success and failure and where those ideas come from. Taking himself as a starting point for the complicated notions that have been discussed since time immemorial, he says that in some people’s eyes and by some measures he is very successful.

He’s an early-retired professor (having been the only member of his wider family to go to university), and he has earned respect from his profession for his teaching, counselling skills and the many books he has published. He says he is loved, he has two fine sons, owns his own house and car and has enough money to live on.

Professor Feltham is in reasonably good health, has travelled fairly widely and enjoys his leisure time. By most measures his life so far has been a success.

Looked at from another angle, and putting aside very good moments, peaks of success and periods of calm wellbeing, you could take a different view. The professor has suffered from depression that has been uncured by therapy; he also has two divorces behind him as well as several broken relationships.

He became a professor relatively late in life (he’s now 62 and an emeritus professor of critical counselling studies at Sheffield Hallam University) in a subject he says many regard as lightweight. He’s not the sort of professor whose work brings in large sums of money, nor does he sit on important committees or jet around the world.

He became redundant a while ago, his pension is very modest, his house is a mid-terrace and his car is small. He suffers from insomnia and admits that sometimes he is lonely. “You could say that at 62 I have mostly come to accept all this,” says Prof Feltham.

“But my self-concept can shift from equanimity to a dark sense of failure. Maybe I can write well, but can I sustain a very long-term relationship? I can write but I am almost completely impractical. I can write, but not as well as many others. And so on...

“Perhaps you can already see two themes emerging here. One is that self-disclosure tends to feel a little embarrassing: one is aware that it isn’t quite the done thing. Failure is stigmatic and parading one’s failures may be considered unwise. The second is that personal success and failure are relative.”

He says his friends call him Eeyore because of his tendency towards “the dark side”’.

His quest to write a book about concepts of failure and where they come from was driven by alternating views of his own interesting life (his pre-academic background includes spells working for the mental health charity MIND and counselling in a bank), and by the urge to provide a “corrective to the hype about happiness – the many self-help books around which purport to show the ‘road to happiness’. “

Prof Feltham’s research into what constitutes failure took him from philosophers like Diogenes and Saint Augustine through to Sartre and Camus and other thinkers, artists and poets. Failure is widely present across all these domains, yet we tend to deny our failures, he says. That’s why the rest of us can tend to cringe when someone we know suddenly decides to talk openly about everything that’s gone wrong with their life and their many weaknesses.

“We’re all set up for failure all the time, but we’re not encouraged to talk about it. I was recently involved in interviewing seven people for one job, and all seven were very well qualified for this academic post and any of them could have been offered it.

“We had to choose one, which was very difficult – and sadly, the other six will have gone home feeling that life is unfair and a certain loss of hope. In other words, a failure.” .

The thing is that what’s called ‘failure’ is so common that we must not take it too personally, says Feltham, and we should also avoid thinking of ourselves as happy/unhappy or lucky/unlucky people.

That said, he suspects “we have a predetermined ability to be happy. I tend to think there’s a strong biological element to depression and optimism – but having a leaning one way or the other does not make you better or worse, a success or a failure.

Does Prof Feltham feel, having considered the ideas of great thinkers, that he himself is not such a failure?

“Hmmm... Having worked in an academic hierarchy, where you are either a beginner/nobody or a superstar, I fell into the trap of feeling I was a mediocrity trapped in between, which is associated with failure. But to my family I am a star.”

He has a free choice as to which view to take more seriously...

Failure by Colin Feltham is published by Acumen, £10.99. To order call 01748 821122.

We can learn from losing ...

“Along with ‘You’re fired’ or ‘I’m leaving you’, statements containing the word or concept of failure, such as ‘You’ve failed your school exams/driving test/job interview’ probably rank clearly among the bleak negatives or low points in our lives. Small wonder that the subject of failure is not top of most people’s favourites for dinner conversation, bed time reading or even academic study. On a personal level failure is usually success’s ugly twin. Indeed ‘unsuccessful’ is synonymous with ‘failed’. I suggest that failure in one guise or another is pervasive, inescapable and has a great deal to teach us...”

Professor Colin Feltham