Failure is universal in a way that success is not. A failure confessed tends to make somebody endearing, while their successes, told aloud, may make us want to bite them. And still it is success we dwell on. Search your social media newsfeeds for admissions of failure, and you’ll find them; but the success story, the achievement post, rules.
My daughter loved the app. Her friends loved it. And, of course, you feel this is going to be the next Snapchat
I became interested in failure having got up close to a good few success stories myself. As a writer, I’ve profiled people who have got somewhere close to where they want to be: high in the album charts, at a Cup final or in a CEO’s chair, front and centre in a Hollywood film. Research and retell the histories of enough achievers, and their rise begins to look less talent-fuelled – not so much the result of hard, solitary toil – and more like a bet that has paid off. The flourishing musician, the medal-winning sportsperson, the profitable entrepreneur: all of them took a punt, once, and we come to consider their story because that punt came good.There’s another narrative we’ve become familiar with: failure as a past-tense business, something overcome. It’s a narrative that fuels a self-help industry, books titled Success Through Failure, How To Fail Most Successfully, How I Raised Myself From Failure, Fail Better, Fail Up and Failure: The Womb Of Success. But I wonder what there is to learn from the countless others we don’t hear about, those relative failures without whom there could be no corresponding successes. The people who simply fail.
What does failure feel like in the low, crummy moment of it? I speak to a couple of musicians, hopefuls who had high ambitions in rock or pop and for whatever reason had to shelve them. It is possible to get by as perfectly OK teachers, lawyers, chefs or journalists, but there are certain pursuits that seem to insist on binary dealings with success and failure, and the music industry is one.