Do You Learn From Failure?
By: Tess Wheeler
Tags: Life Lessons, Self, Experience, Awareness, Psychology

Our decisions don’t always work out. That’s a given. Maybe it’s a hobby we always thought we’d be good at, and we bought all the necessary kit only to find photography or fly fishing are not for us. Or perhaps it’s a job we wanted; we put long hours into the application form, are delighted to be called for interview, and elated to get that phone call telling us we’ve landed the position. But sometimes the best thing about a new job is the period between being offered it and the start date. A few days or weeks in, we realise we’ve made a big mistake. This isn’t the job for us and we hate it.

It can be difficult to admit

Sometimes it’s hard enough to admit this to ourselves, let alone to other people. I always thought it would be great to work in a bookshop and I was excited to be offered a job in the largest one in my city. It’s located in a fabulous old building and, as a customer, I adore it. But the reality of working there was quite different from what I expected, for a myriad of reasons.

A month or so after I’d started, I bumped into a friend I hadn’t seen for a few weeks, and she asked how I liked my new job.

“I quit”

“What, already??”

It was embarrassing to admit. Nobody wants to be seen as a quitter. But part of life is learning to recognise what you don’t like or what you’re not good at, as well as what suits you. And when you’ve recognised it, you have to be able to admit it to yourself and to others. It’s not easy to tell your new boss or your partner that you’ve made a mistake, but life’s too short to stay trapped in something you hate.

Learning from your experience

Okay, you’ve made a mistake and you’ve moved on. The bigger point is, have you learned from it? Will you remember why you hated the hobby, or the job, or visiting extended family for that long holiday? Will you recall it accurately or are you destined to make the same mistake again, a year or two down the line? It’s something I’m guilty of, and I suppose I’m not unique in this.

So recently I had a pang. I was browsing in the very same bookshop and found myself thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice to work here? Perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all. Was I being a bit of a drama queen about the whole thing?”

Fortunately, I gave myself a good mental kick, came home, and got out a letter I’d written when I left the job:

“Dear Tess,

Remember why you hate this job so much. Younger colleagues go and cry in the stock cupboard because of the managers. The rota changes at the drop of a hat and you’re made to feel guilty if you don’t want to take on extra shifts. They never give you a whole weekend off. You were left alone in the busiest department with a stream of difficult customer queries after just three days. You’ve been told you may have to cover in the cafe, clearing tables and making sandwiches, and that you can be sent to any branch in the region. YOU HATE THIS.”

I wrote this letter to myself because I knew from experience how bad I am at remembering things clearly, and how easily I gloss over negative events or situations. There may be a term in psychology for this — perhaps some kind of odd ‘halo effect’? Or maybe I’m just an eternal optimist.

For whatever reason, I struggle with remembering and learning from experience. I’ve glossed over bad relationships and the reasons for friendship breakdowns, only to find myself back in the same position again. I forgot the intensity of pain in childbirth until I went into labour for the second time. (This was true of about 50% of women in a Swedish study: five years later they remembered the pain as being less severe than they originally rated it.)

Similarly, I suspected that I’d forget just how much I disliked that job, and I did. The letter saved me from making a silly mistake. They say time heals all wounds and I guess it’s true for me. But sometimes it’s better not to forget.

Write it down

And so I developed this strategy of letter writing. I know I won’t remember, but writing a letter to myself means I don’t have to. There it is in black and white; a reminder from my past self of my feelings and the fact that my memory is playing tricks on me. Going down the same path would be a foolish move.

This morning, my 15-year-old daughter was talking about the subjects she’ll choose to study in more depth after her GCSE exams (at 16). She’s determined, at the moment, not to continue studying history. But she says she’s afraid if she gets a really good result, she’ll waver and allow herself to be talked into it.

And so I shared my letter writing advice with her.

Write all the reasons you don’t like something and what you discovered about it. You can write good things, too, if you want. That way you’ll know when you read it back that you were being objective.

Go into detail — this is important. So if it’s about spending five days last Christmas with Auntie Beryl and Uncle Sid and their seven boisterous children, recount the excruciating agonies of the experience and how it made you feel.

Don’t hold back. This is for your eyes only. Auntie Beryl never has to see it.

Of course, you’re free to change your mind. Just because you’ve written this letter doesn’t mean you can’t decide history is the best option for you after all. Maybe you failed everything else. (Don’t worry, I didn’t say this to my daughter…)

But if you feel strongly about the experience and you write truthfully, chances are the letter will resonate with your future self.

Reading the words you wrote will bring the memories flooding back and you’ll save yourself from blundering into the wrong decision. Again.

It works for me. If you think you’re prone to forgetting and sanitising past experiences, why not give it a go?