Sarah Harte: Learn how to fail — and learn to embrace the normality of it

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar checks his Christmas cracker with Alina Chorna, five, from Ukraine, at Vicar St, Dublin. Picture: Brian Lawless

Last Saturday, when Leo Varadkar was confirmed as Taoiseach for the second time, he spoke about children and “making it possible to dream big dreams”. Two separate matters recently have caused me to wonder about our national attitude to success and failure.

The first was the commentary that followed the recent RTÉ documentary on Seán Quinn. 

Clearly, Quinn deserves trenchant criticism on several fronts. The taxpayer paid a heavy price for his punt on high-risk contracts for difference in Anglo Irish Bank. Even though he acknowledged this as a “fatal decision” overall, he came across as a man who felt he was more sinned against than sinning. 

His attitude to the vicious attack on Kevin Lunney was less than satisfactory. 

Nonetheless, in some of the media coverage, there was an unmistakable tone of something approaching satisfaction at Quinn’s downfall.

The second was a vicious review of the latest novel from a highly regarded, Booker-nominated Irish writer. 

A Google search threw up very little about the reviewer. The author must have been devastated, but in a way, the piece spoke more about the reviewer, his insecurities, and his attitude to somebody more successful than him at least externally.

Fear of failure

Tall poppy syndrome, although not exclusively an Irish trait, does seem especially embedded in our psyche. 

The unpleasant truth is that Irish culture stigmatises both success and failure. Does this mindset risk holding us back?

In June this year, an interesting UCC Department of Economics report, Innovating in Ireland: Can We Fail Better?, said that we needed to cultivate “a national innovation ecosystem which is not hampered by binary definitions of success and failure”.

It reported that the Irish fear of failure hampers business innovation in part because we conflate failure with fault. According to the study, “learning from failure is thought to be far more valuable than learning from success, and the magnitude of failure significantly determines how well lessons will be learned”.

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It seems we over-emphasise the importance of marginal improvements due to a fear of ‘long shots’ failing. This dread of failure manifests itself in procurement decisions by large Irish public funding bodies that gravitate towards large multinationals rather than SMEs or start-ups, unlike in the US. 

In real-life practical terms, this should be of concern.

And yet, it’s not a massive surprise. We live in a country where standing behind a yard of counter still has the distinct whiff of fumbling in the greasy till, although we give a ‘céad míle fáilte’ to foreign multinationals. 

Job creation

Make no mistake, we massively undervalue the contribution of SMEs as essential contributors to job creation and economic development.

The report also says that an overemphasis on job creation may potentially disadvantage unicorn start-ups, thus thwarting radical innovation. 

The mentality of valuing a secure job makes total sense. Historically, we couldn’t afford to fail. A benign view of our attitude to failure would say that it comes from the necessity of pragmatism. Arguably this is why we overvalue the professions.

The report concludes that we need indigenous SMEs to disrupt and innovate. Radical disruptive innovation is the most likely solution to major societal issues such as climate change and digital transformation.

The US notion that failure is an apprenticeship that one serves as part of the entrepreneurial journey isn’t a natural part of our DNA. However, maybe there are things that we could take from the US playbook.

Christina Wallace is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, who has a business failure behind her which she has described as deeply painful. She also has gone on to build several successful businesses. Her book, The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger than Your Business Card is out in April 2023.

Wallace comments on raising children: “I’m constantly thinking about how I can prepare them for the world. 

And honestly, I think a lot of it comes down to failure. How to fail well. How to get back up. How to take appropriate risks and learn along the way.”

Wallace does reference the term ‘appropriate risk’. Paraphrasing Orwell, not all failures are equal, and it must be said that some failures are more honest than others. 

We definitely don’t need people to colour outside the lines to the extent that Quinn did, but in earlier years, he was brave and showed vision. His disruption in the cement industry in particular stands out.

Stigmatisation of failure

And her point about what lessons we impart to kids is germane. The stigmatisation of failure leads to fear of failure, which is bound to inhibit people from trying things. Our cultural education debatably teaches kids to fear exploration in a way that doesn’t happen in the US.

Take our attitude to the Leaving Certificate, where success and failure are entirely binary. Students who get insufficient points for college are left feeling that they are on the scrap heap. It’s bonkers, and really destructive.

The downside to US bootstrap fever is their nakedly capitalist society, but there would be benefits to destigmatising failure here. Maybe we need to teach our children that they can fail, and while we’re at it, that the success of others is not a clarion call to wait in the long grass for them.

Because it must be refreshing and liberating to live in a country where you can stick your head above the parapet without thinking there’s a higher-than-average chance you will live to regret it.

Nobody gets through life without failures big or small, personal or professional. It could be a career reversal, a relationship breakdown, or a project you pursued that just didn’t pan out.

Elizabeth Day, the author and journalist, has a hugely successful podcast that has topped the iTunes charts on how to celebrate the things that haven’t gone right, which is a good way to put it. Called How to Fail, it’s worth a listen.

Author and podcaster Elizabeth Day

Ironically, the podcast is a runaway success, thus lifting Day firmly out of the category of failure (if she was ever in it, her past CV seems to suggest not). But she has spoken about failures in her personal life.

I will refrain from quoting Beckett because he would have cringed at how his ‘fail better’ line has been truncated and bandied around as a motivational slogan, suggesting that this genius was perkily concerned with failure as a step on the road to self-fulfilment rather than simply failure per se.

But perhaps this is the best way to consider it: When we fail, it can seem as if we are completely alone, but the enduring truth is that there is nothing more human than to fail.