There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without it being compounded by the search for a scapegoat.

In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.

10: Failure Immunity

“We’ve been trying a lot of different things on the way to designing a life that is worth the living. Using the curiosity mind-set, we’ve gone out into the world and met some interesting people. We’ve radically collaborated with friends and family and prototyped some meaningful engagements with the world. And throughout this life design journey, we’ve gotten comfortable with the bias-to-action mind-set, and whenever we’re in doubt, we know it’s time to do something.

All along, you have been developing something positive psychologists like Angela Duckworth call perseverance or grit. Duckworth’s studies on grit and self-control demonstrate that grit is a better measure of potential success than IQ. Failure immunity gives you grit to spare.

So what does this have to do with life design? Just this: when you remember that you are always playing the infinite game of becoming more and more yourself and designing how to express the amazingness of you into the world, you can’t fail. With the infinite-game mind-set, you are not just adept at failure reduction—you are truly failure-immune. Sure, you’ll experience pain and loss or serious setbacks, but they won’t make you less of a person, and you don’t experience these setbacks as an existential “failure” from which you can’t recover.

Categorize Your Failures

It’s useful to categorize failures into three types so you can more easily identify where the growth potential lies.

Screwups are just that—simple mistakes about things that you normally get right. It’s not that you can’t do better. You normally do these things right, so you don’t really need to learn anything from this—you just screwed up. The best response here is to acknowledge you screwed up, apologize as needed, and move on.

Weaknesses are failures that happen because of one of your abiding failings. These are the mistakes that you make over and over. You know the source of these failures well. They are old friends. You’ve probably worked at correcting them already, and have improved as far as you think you’re going to. You try to avoid getting caught by these weaknesses, but they happen. We’re not suggesting you cave in prematurely and accept mediocre performance, but we are suggesting that there isn’t much upside in trying to change your stripes. It’s a judgment call, of course, but some failures are just part of your makeup, and your best strategy is avoidance of the situations that prompt them instead of improvement.

Growth opportunities are the failures that didn’t have to happen, or at least don’t have to happen the next time. The cause of these failures is identifiable, and a fix is available. We want to direct our attention here, rather than get distracted by the low return on spending too much time on the other failure types.

As you will learn in this book, how we frame or reframe failure has a great deal to do with our capacity to fail well. Reframing failure is the life-enhancing skill that helps us overcome our spontaneous aversion to failure. It starts with the willingness to look at yourself—not to engage in extensive self-criticism or to enumerate your personal flaws, but to become more aware of universal tendencies that stem from how we’re wired and are compounded by how we’re socialized. This is not about rumination—a repetitive negative thought process that isn’t productive—or self-flagellation. But it may mean taking a look at some of your idiosyncratic habits. Without this, it’s hard to experiment with practices that help us think and act differently.