The Stanifesto

Build resilience by practicing failure

This post was originally published on StayDiligent.com.

Last week, Diligent attended Compostmodern, a biannual gathering by AIGA SF that brings together the design community to talk about sustainability issues. Except sustainability isn't sexy anymore and honestly never was. Who gets excited about "sustaining?"

Fortunately, the theme this year was "resilience", which is a new word that we've all heard less often. Speakers did their best to pin down exactly what it meant, deftly exploring sub-themes like connectivity, redundancy, simplicity, learning, and adaptability. Trying to summarize the day's message, John Thackara hit the nail on the head.

Resilience is the ability to take a punch in the face.

If there's a more visceral way to describe the issues facing the world today, I can't think of one. Though experts may disagree on exactly how far away the fist is or how much it will hurt or what we did to deserve it, all of humanity is currently taking a punch to the face.

How to take a punch to the face

I have to admit, I immediately googled "how to take a punch to the face." Turns out there are a lot of people on the Internet with strong opinions on the subject. Here's the basic advice that everyone agreed on:
  • Relax. If you focus on the pain, it will hurt more. Keep your head in the game and stay focused on protecting yourself.
  • Roll with the blow. It's not just a cliché. Moving in the direction of the punch reduces effective velocity and spreads out impact out time.
  • Practice. Nothing beats already knowing how it feels to take a punch to the face.
There's a lot there that can be applied to sustainability, but a big question remains: how do we practice taking a punch to the face?

Getting stronger requires failure

I joined a gym this year. I've never been a gym person—preferring a neighborhood jog to the clanking of weight machines—but I recently turned 35, started feeling "old" for the first time, and decided to do something about it. I've also never been the kind of person who just does something about it without researching and overanalyzing first.

The way muscle is built really fascinated me. I had always assumed that lifting weights just made you stronger. The truth is more interesting.

  1. When we push ourselves to lift heavy objects, we make tiny tears in our muscle fiber. The technical term is microtrauma.
  2. In healing this microtrauma, our body gets huffy and decides to build the muscle back a little stronger so it doesn't get injured next time, resulting in increased muscle mass (technical term: hypertrophy).
  3. Next time, we add a little more weight (technical term: progressive overload) so we're constantly failing and getting stronger.
We don't get better to avoid failure. We fail in order to get better.

That's not an aphorism, it's a physiological truth. I'll admit it sounds suspiciously like, "Pain is weakness leaving the body." or "Second place is the first loser." or "No fear." or a number of other slogans on t-shirts you'd see around a trailer park. Or Silicon Valley.

Failure is the path to success

If you're familiar with startup culture, you may be aware of how it glamorizes failure. There are stories embracing failure, articles celebrating failure, even conferences about failure. Failure is a badge of honor.

While fear of failure can cause stagnation, I've never fully believed that raising millions of dollars in venture capital and then watching it all go down in flames deserved a party. Ideally, we'd find a way that allows us to practice failure without breaking the bank.

The second day of Compostmodern was a workshop facilitated by Future Partners. They called it a Future Blitz, which evidently has a Blitz Cycle or some such. There are multiple principles, but the one that jumped out at me was:

Bet Small. Based on what we learn from prototyping, we help you make small bets with the people and communities who are important to the positive change you are pursuing. These small bets minimize your losses and produce insights you can gain only by going live. Ultimately small bets allow you to fail fast so you can win bigger.
Structure your work so you're constantly trying things of which you're not entirely capable. That cycle of constantly trying and failing (or succeeding!) seems like perfect advice on practicing taking a punch to the face.