The Problem With Glorifying Failure (and a Healthier Way to Deal With It)

We love a good failure story, but usually only when we already know it has a happy ending. Glorifying failure can be just as unhelpful as fearing it. The healthier path is neither to romanticise failure nor to be crushed by it, but to look at it honestly and learn what it actually has to teach.

We have all heard the story. Michael Jordan was “cut” from his high school basketball team. He was devastated. He worked harder. He practised relentlessly. And eventually, he became Michael Jordan. (The real version is a little softer than the legend: he was left off the varsity team as a sophomore and played another year on junior varsity. Even our favourite failure story is partly a story we have polished.) Somewhere along the way, a teenage disappointment became a legendary story of failure. And that is what made me think about how we talk about failure.

We only love failure when we already know the ending

We love the story of failure when we already know the ending. Because millions of teenagers are rejected from teams. Millions of people don’t get the job. Millions start businesses that don’t work. Millions of relationships end. Millions of people take a risk, fail, and don’t become wildly successful afterwards. We don’t tell their stories. We tell the story of the person who failed and then won. This is survivorship bias in action. We build our beliefs about failure from the tiny sample of people it happened to work out for, and quietly ignore everyone it didn’t.

Glorifying failure ignores how much it can simply hurt

Failure is part of life. But it is not automatically a glorious awakening. Sometimes it is just painful. Telling someone in the middle of a real loss that it is secretly a gift can feel less like encouragement and more like being asked to perform gratitude they do not feel. Glorifying failure skips the hard part, and the hard part is usually where the honesty lives.

Three unhelpful ways we respond to failure

When failure actually lands, most of us reach for one of three responses, and none of them help much:

• We reject it. “It wasn’t really my fault. It doesn’t count.”
• We glorify it. “Everything happens for a reason. Failure is amazing. I learned so much!”
• We internalise it. “I failed. Therefore, I am a failure.”

Rejecting it means we learn nothing. Glorifying it means we skip the grief. Internalising it means we turn one event into an identity. None of them let the failure be what it actually is.

The alternative to glorifying failure: process it

But perhaps there is another way. We can process it. Look honestly at what happened. What was in our control? What wasn’t? What can we learn? And perhaps sometimes that is enough. This is closer to what Harvard’s Amy Edmondson describes in her work on learning from failure: not all failure is a lesson, and learning from it is not automatic. It takes an honest look and a little self-compassion, which is far easier in a culture of psychological safety, where people can admit a failure without being punished for it.

So no, failure is not a badge to collect or a shame to hide. It is just information, if we are willing to sit with it honestly. That is also the real foundation of resilience, which is less about bouncing back quickly and more about facing what happened without flinching.

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