On failing

I'm fascinated by failure.  It terrifies me, and yet I can't stop thinking about it.

According to therapist Rick Carson, we all have a personal gremlin, whispering dark thoughts in our ears.  Mine sticks an electric cattle-prod on my spine and fires me with tension every time I make - or fear I'm about to make - any kind of error.  "You are a failure", she tells me.  "You don't know how to do this.  They're going to FIND YOU OUT".  She makes my shoulders tense, my face go slightly blank and my voice contract.  I can become quite angry, and blame other people for this potential disaster (in an outwardly terribly nice, slightly passive-aggressive way).  I have nightmares, stress dreams where other people discover my total lack of ability.  I lie in bed knowing they're dreams but unable to wake up.  I bore my husband with worries and problems blown out of all proportion.

And yet I don't let my gremlin go.  I hold on to her, her warm furry body next to mine, and deny her her freedom.  You see, I need her.  She's got me where I am today.

It's quite a motivating force, an absolute terror of failure.  It makes you work damn hard, for a start.  And perhaps in an effort to convince myself, I have become extremely good at convincing others that I'm confident and capable.

I read a brilliant book last year, called Being Wrong.  Its author, Kathryn Schulz, carefully details all the ways in which being wrong is a fundamental part of the human condition - and yet in some ways a logical impossibility.  We don't often say, "I am wrong".  Far more usual to say, "I was wrong".  (Of course, we're very happy with "you are wrong".  It's a Yes, Minister irregular verb: I am right, you are mistaken, he is a total lunatic.)

Schulz's book - and her TED talk - argue that the healthy thing to do is to embrace our mistakes.  They're how we learn, after all, change and develop and become better at stuff.  So accept that we will be wrong - in fact, be glad and celebrate.  Embrace error, fawn on failure, and delight in disaster.

But as Schulz herself says, easy to say, hard to do in reality.  Because in the present tense, I don't think I am wrong.  If I thought I was, I'd do something about it, right?

Except, of course, I do often think I'm wrong.  But it doesn't make me a healthy, happy person.  It makes me feel tense and awful and terrified.  And that's because someone else might find out.

So I've been thinking that I need to find ways to let my failure out.  Slip the veil and reveal some wrongness to people.  In small ways, if possible, in order to not terrify anyone - including myself.

So I'm doing this crazy job at the Natural History Museum, which clearly I don't know how to do, because I've made it up and it's not been done before, certainly not by me.  And I've called it an experiment: which is genius, because it means that failure is OK.  As Ben Goldacre says, there's a moral duty to publish negative results as well as positive when running experiments.  Especially when funded by public money.

So yesterday I stood up in front of 30 people, including the Director of the whole museum, and told them that we'd run our first event and we'd failed to hit one of our targets.  Of course, I emphasised that we'd succeeded on two of the three, and I told them why it's bloody hard to hit the first.  But still.  Feels like a minor triumph.

I'm going to try and be publicly wrong about something else this week, too.  How about you?

(I think George Osborne is perhaps on a similar personal journey.)