Is failure excess baggage or is it where the real strength lies?

In a world of platitudes, sometimes it takes the ruthless insight of a high-level sports coach to cut to the heart of a matter.

When England football manager Gareth Southgate explained his decision to field such a young squad at this summer’s Euro championships, he said he had chosen the team, some of them still just teenagers, because they were “unencumbered by the baggage of failure”.

I was reminded of this quote in recent weeks as I watched the incredible successes of young sportspeople such as the Irish golfer Leona Maguire, and the tennis players Emma Raducanu and Leylah Fernandez.

Southgate’s theory makes sense to some extent. When we are young and inexperienced, we don’t yet know what we are not capable of, we have not yet discovered the limits of our abilities. Add to this the phenomenal natural talent of Maguire et al and you’ve got a recipe for success.

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But the Southgate quote snagged a thread on the comforting blanket of my philosophy about failure and threatened to unravel the whole thing. As a fan of the author Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast, I had fully signed up to the idea that failure has been lately remodelled as a positive thing, just a step on the path to success.

We are often given the example of the most successful failure in the world, the late Steve Jobs, a college dropout who was also key to Apple’s global success. That old nugget about failure making you stronger is a cliche; it may be true but it’s also the equivalent of someone telling you the bird poop on your head means good luck is coming your way. Sometimes it’s just a way of making ourselves feel better about our failure.

Rejection

Southgate’s comment made me wonder – do our failures really make us stronger, or do they just mount up as excess baggage on the long-haul flight that is our life? When you think about how unavoidable failure is, it’s probably worth trying to negotiate some kind of truce with it, maybe a Ryanair-like deal, where we cap the weight of failure baggage we are prepared to carry at 20kg.

Perhaps the excess baggage of failure doesn't have to be all negative. Sometimes weight can be a positive

Rejection is probably a writer’s most frequent encounter with failure. But if I had to name what I consider my greatest professional failure, I think it would be that I wasted so much time, that I didn’t pursue my goals earlier or with much confidence.

About 13 years ago, I was invited to write a novel for a big publisher. I flew to London, had a meeting with the publisher, and agreed to work with an editor on an idea I had for a book. I floated home on the exciting realisation that a long-held goal was on the verge of coming true.

But back home in Dublin the carriage became a pumpkin again, the horsemen were mice, and the idea that I could write a book was equally unbelievable to me. I didn’t finish the book, and instead let it circle the sinkhole of my fear of failure.

Important lessons

I don’t think that specific failure made me stronger, but it did teach me two important lessons. The first was when once-in-a-lifetime opportunities cross your path, you should grab them and give them your very best effort. The second was a realisation that it is better to fail miserably, spectacularly even, in the process of doing, than to fail by not even trying.

So I have to admit then that I do believe there are silver linings to be found in failure, even if they are bittersweet. In sport, failure may be black and white – you either win or you lose – but in life there are gradations. There are, thankfully, second chances (I eventually wrote a different book) and there are always positives to be found, even if it’s just in the awareness that you can withstand failure, you can survive it. We might not become stronger, but we will at least gain some wisdom.

It may be mean-spirited to add, but Southgate’s choice of youth and optimism over experience with its pannier bags of failure didn’t lead to success for them in the end.

Perhaps the excess baggage of failure doesn’t have to be all negative. Sometimes weight can be a positive. It can provide ballast to ground you when you feel adrift, a plumbline to centre you in times of extreme pressure. It might even make you fitter, more resilient, indeed stronger after all, just like those weighted bags and vests that marathon runners wear while in training.

And just like those marathon runners, if we can figure out how to shed our little backpacks of failure, we might just find ourselves lighter, more nimble, more prepared for success.

That’s the hard-earned reward of having carried the weight of failure for so long in the first place.