The Cost of Commodifying Failure

With start-up culture’s rise in popularity, insight and transparency around the conditions that produce successful innovations are talked about more than ever. One of the more popular trends we have adopted from the startup world is the notion of ‘embracing failure.’ Fail fast. Fail often. Failure is not only an option, it’s often a celebrated outcome. Speaking as an entrepreneur who works with other entrepreneurs, I can tell you that the concept of failure is often outright glorified. The question on my mind is: have we taken it too far? Have we glorified it so much that we have begun using our changing relationship with it as a sales tactic? Are we unintentionally commodifying failure at the cost of actually learning something from it?

Innovation is often a result of failure. Instead of getting our intended results, we may get results that not only completely disrupt our understanding of something, but also allow us an opportunity to innovate that space. A naval officer named Richard Jones, for example, accidentally discovered the Slinky in this way. He was experimenting with tension springs to develop a meter for monitoring power on naval battleships when he knocked over a shelf of the springs and watched as they effortlessly ‘walked’ down the shelf instead of simply falling off. He may not have known it in that moment, in the experimentation phase of a completely different invention, but he ended up discovering one of the most iconic toys there is. Failure is a known side effect of experimentation, whether in the process or the final result. Richard Jones could have easily thrown his arms up in the air and seen this incident simply as a mistake or minor setback. I would have. He did not, and thank goodness. Slinkys are rad. Good inventors and innovators know that without experimentation and failure we would not learn. In one way or another we all understand that. So then what’s the problem?

As everyday consumers we are bombarded with messaging that hits us on both a deeply personal level, and over time on a larger behavioural level within our society or community. What and how we buy things is integral to the way we make sense of the world and our place in it. Buying has become a form of self-expression. We buy the basics we need to survive but we also buy things that will send signals to others about the type of person we are. Brands know this. They also know we desperately crave to fit in somewhere and be normal to someone. Often because of this, brands use fear-based campaigns. Whether it is worrying about our child’s health or how we measure up to current beauty standards, brands manipulate these fears into buying habits all the time. We all have a fear of failure especially when we compare ourselves to those around us. So what happens when we are afraid of failure while simultaneously carrying it around as a badge of honour? How does that even happen?

So what happens when we are afraid of failure while simultaneously carrying it around as a badge of honour?

As start-up culture became trendy, most of the viral success stories were of failures turned successes; mistakes turned advancements. The most innovative, inventive, creative, and desirable jobs were coming out of the startup world. This is still true. We gobble up the stories of young twenty-something CEOs who ride their skateboards into work, wear t-shirts in the office, and buy rounds of craft beer for employees on Fridays. Then we hear stories of investors not taking entrepreneurs seriously until they’ve had at least three failures under their belt. This uncovering of failure as a tool for success was and still is a point of fascination. Writers, speakers, and consultants alike realized that many of these conditions could be studied and recreated to affect workplace culture for the better.

It is at this very crucial point that we shift from natural progress to commodification. Books, talks, and complex thinking is imitated and condensed over and over again until we are left with only the poster in place of a great masterpiece. Tip sheets and cheat sheets; top ten lists and short how-to ebooks. Over time the difference between poster and masterpiece begins to matter to us less because these “Coles Notes” [Cliff’s Notes in the US] get us to the results faster. A huge wave of entrepreneurs and consultants were born from this shortcut culture. This wave built businesses entirely around the idea of selling their ‘hacks’ for this kind of freer, more flexible, sometimes more meaningful life, to other budding entrepreneurs and businesses.

We’ve already bought into the notion that failure is a badge of honour but we are still terrified of failing ourselves.

In my world, as an entrepreneur, the most typical example I come across looks something like this: “I struggled for years to build up my social media following. Don’t go through the struggle I did. Learn from my failures. Buy my ebook and get 10,000 new Twitter followers.” Sometimes it’s subtler. How often have you Googled something along the lines of “how to make money making YouTube videos?” or, “how to become social media famous?” and been hit with a ton of content titled as answers to those very questions? The content that exists in this space is not altogether useless or lacking in good ideas. I am very simply arguing that in commodifying a complex notion like failure we are at risk of losing out on some incredibly important lessons. As entrepreneurs, we see this sales messaging often because we are the best market for it. We’ve already bought into the notion that failure is a badge of honour but we are still terrified of failing ourselves. This content relies on both our fear and acceptance of failure. We get to share in the emotional experience of failure but with the guaranteed result of success. How do we know this? Well, the good ones tend to have numerous testimonials backing up their claims.