I have had more than my fair share of failures. I tore my hamstring in a gold medal race at a national track championship. And my first business venture failed, which admittingly, was a hard pill to swallow. If my setbacks have taught me one thing, it’s that there is a fine line between failure vs success.
What the 4-Minute Mile Taught Us About Failure vs Success
Roger Bannister was the first man to run a mile in under four minutes.
In 1954, he completed the race in exactly 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds.1 Had he finished just one second slower, his race would’ve felt like a failure, even if he had finished in first place.
Prior to his breakthrough success, the general impression was that a four-minute mile was impossible. At the time, the world record had been out of reach for nine years. Many tried, but only a few got close.
It wasn’t until Bannister, at age 25, broke the four-minute mark for the first time that we started rethinking the limits of the human body.
How did he do it?
Look at Bannister and you see he was a gifted athlete. He had mental toughness, a positive attitude, and the ability to delay gratification. On top of that, he trained rigorously, lived in a healthy way, and put in hard work.2
When the time came for Bannister to perform, he could deliver.
His performance did not just change how we look at athletic performance, but it also proves an important point: A slight difference in your results can make or break your success.
Achieve your goals and run under 4 minutes and you’re looked upon as a success. Miss your target by one second and you feel like a failure.
Failure Feedback and Edison’s Light Bulb
We consider success and failure to be opposites, with both at different ends of the spectrum. We either meet a desirable objective and feel that our efforts lead to an accomplishment, or fail to meet a target and feel incompetent.
However, the notion that success and failure are independent could not be further from the truth. Both are deeply intertwined with each other.
Thomas Edison, American inventor and businessman, made countless of attempts at inventing the right filament for his light bulb. Somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000 of Edison’s experiment failed.3
It was not until years after Edison first began his research that the idea of the light bulb picked up traction. Today, electrical light is an everyday convenience we cannot imagine living without.
Had Edison not failed at finding the right filament through a long series of experiments, his name would not have been as well-known as it is today. Had he chosen instant gratification and stopped early, his invention would not be taught in high school lectures around the world.
A setback is an essential component of achievement because it provides us with guidance. It is a teachable moment that shows us how to refine our approach and take risks more sensibly the next time.
A famous quote of Thomas Edison reads, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” Negative results accelerated, rather than stalled, his career. Edison’s work offers a great example and shows that personal failure and success and are deeply interconnected.
Failure vs Success: Focus on the Process, Not the Result
Look at the picture above. What do you see?
From the audience’s perspective, we see a talented juggler capable of continuously tossing and catching delicate plates. But if we zoom out and look behind the stage, we see that many of them are shattered.
The point this picture is trying to prove is that people only see the result and not the process. The shattered plates show a great deal of effort, but all that the audience sees is a talented performer juggling plates.
We are quick to think that successful people have natural aptitude or skill, but we do not see the hours of work and many failed attempts. We forget that a successful person was once an unsuccessful person.
This is not just true for stage performances but also for filmmaking. What we see in theatres is the result of years of planning, writing, filming, and editing.
The original Avatar movie took 15 years to complete. Director James Cameron wrote an 80-page script, drawing inspiration “from every single science fiction book” he read in his youth. A language expert was hired to create a unique language for the movie while mapping out small details of their culture. On top of that, the production team had to invent new filming techniques to generate photorealistic computer-generated characters.4
From a layperson’s perspective, a movie like Avatar might not seem like a lot of work. Write a script, find a cast, record the scenes, create some computer animations, and put it all together.
However, the production scale of Avatar was enormous. Many of us didn’t get to see the broken plates on the backstage.
What Your Biology Says About Failure vs Success
We are biologically wired to fear failure. Centuries ago, failure meant getting killed by an enemy tribe or eaten alive by a predator.
Fear helped our ancestors avoid risky situations and stay out of life-threatening situations. Those who were not afraid to fail did not live long enough to pass on their genes to offspring.
Today, most of us do not have to worry about predators or other outside danger. Our fear is of a different nature: When people fail, they look weak.
Everyone wants to gain appreciation, acceptance, and respect. We all want to be the next Bannister, Edison, or Cameron and achieve something that no one else has ever achieved. But we feel embarrassed when we set a goal for ourselves and do not achieve it, especially when public pressure is high.
To accomplish remarkable results, we must get comfortable with facing hardship and judgement. That is, we have to discern irrational fears from real ones and continue when things get tough. History has repeatedly shown that setbacks are key to large accomplishments.
The Importance of Persistence
The key to success is not merely about hard work, talent, or your mindset, but it’s also about your ability to continue in face of adversity. Our past failures might suggest a lack of success, but they provide positive feedback and allow us to adjust our course of action.
We all face challenges in daily life, but what sets apart successful people from those who fail, is the ability to persist despite difficulty. You can write your own success story and set yourself up for a lifetime of success if you experiment with different things and use failures as a learning opportunity.
The longer you ride the fine line between success and failure, the more likely you are to succeed. Personal success could be just around the corner, or you could still be at the beginning of your journey. You don’t know how close you are unless you ignore the fear of failure and put in hard work, day in and day out.
Take it from Edison himself, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
References
- You can watch a video of the first four-minute mile here.
- Roger Bannister’s book titled, “The Four Minute Mile” gives insight into his character talks about his training regimen.
- This likely originated in an 1890 interview in Harper’s Monthly Magazine: “’I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently to be true.”
- You can read more about the production of the Avatar movie here.