As someone who spends a lot of their life battling imposter syndrome and a fear of failure, I’ve been thinking about what failure actually means.
As a magician, failure is surprisingly difficult to quantify. And I suspect that’s true of most jobs.
Some people are incredibly sensitive to failure. Others seem able to power through anything without questioning themselves for a second, like some sort of Elon Terminator.
Neither extreme seems particularly helpful. One can be debilitating, and the other is how you end up wearing a finance gilet and starting a podcast.
But this post is for those of us in the first category.
About once a week, I call my best pal (and co-founder of TalkMagic) Neb Maciver, to tell him I’m quitting magic.
Thankfully, he’s very good at challenging my reasoning. And 99% of the time, I can’t point to an objective failure.
It’s the way I feel I came across. The way I feel somebody interpreted something I said. The reaction I feel somebody had to a particular moment.
In other words, I make a living pretending I can read minds, then spend my spare time attempting to read people’s minds and using the imaginary results to judge myself. I really should return to therapy…
It’s an exhausting trap. We take something we know to be true: “I stumbled over that bit of script.” Add something we couldn’t possibly know: “Everyone thinks I’m incompetent.” And arrive at: “I’m a colossal failure.” Lovely.
I think those of us who are particularly sensitive to failure could benefit from examining our beliefs against the facts, and perhaps treating ourselves with the same kindness we’d offer a friend.
Of course, this isn’t about avoiding accountability. Sometimes we genuinely mess up.
But if we’re going to beat ourselves up over a failure, perhaps the least we can do is check that it actually happened first.
