Not reaching our goals is very normal

One country after another is exiting the 2018 World Cup, packing their bags and leaving Russia. Only Croatia and France are left to play in the final on Sunday. Fans from around the world have had to face the fact that their country lost. My conclusion? Now is a good a time as any to reflect on failure.

Aside from sports, many, many other areas of human endeavor are some mix of success and failure. Superficially, and depending on how we measure it, I’d like to argue that failure is generally far more widespread than success. And that’s not only because there can only be one winner, as in sports championships like the World Cup. Let’s look at examples from completely different fields:

Every year, the US Congress introduces thousands of bills (proposed legislation), but only about 4 to 5 percent of those end up as laws. That’s a lot of effort – given that bills are hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages long – going into something that doesn’t succeed.

Now let’s take an example from the private sector. In the US, hundreds of thousands of new businesses are established every year. In 2015 that number was 679,072 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Based on historic trends, 50% of all new businesses shut down within five years. Not always because they failed, of course, but probably most people start businesses that they hope will last much longer.

Returning to the subject of sports – in baseball, America’s pastime, the chances of making it to the Major Leagues from the minors, i.e. the lower professional leagues, are only about one in 10. Once they reach the Majors, there is more failure – the average batter fails to reach base by getting a hit  (the primary, if not the only, reason for stepping up to the plate) almost three out of every four tries.

What about New Year’s resolutions? Studies have shown that less than 10 percent of people who make resolutions stick to them. Many fail to keep their resolutions for more than a few weeks. Let’s take a longer view.  Many, if not most of us, don’t achieve the life goals we set ourselves when we were young. I certainly myself failed to earn a living as an actor (after two years of theater school in Russia and over 4 years of trying to break into the theater in New York), never ran a marathon as fast as I wanted, never wrote the novel I started (and tore up) umpteen times in my younger years. The list goes on.  Even high-performing individuals and companies often don’t reach their goals, as evidenced by the sports examples from above or the losers in Presidential elections.

Do these examples, and the statistics, mean are we are simply doomed to failure in our greatest aspirations? Do they suggest that we humans are hopeless at everything we try? I would argue no, not at all.

First, what they indicate is just how much effort we put into trying. How much thinking, planning, time, and money are invested in reaching goals! Think about it: Tens of thousands of kids work hard to become professional athletes or reach the Olympics. Hundreds of thousands of people start businesses every year (even in the depths of the Great Recession over half a million new businesses were started in the US). Millions of us still make New Year’s resolutions.

I’m not saying that merely trying is good enough, or that we should excuse failure because it is the norm. But we should understand it in context – not getting all the way there is human and quite normal. And I’m not saying that we should lower the bar. You need to make a darn good effort to reach whatever it is you are aiming for. Falling short of a goal when you try is very different from not getting there because you didn’t bother. Even if most of us don’t get there, we still get something out of it, we land somewhere. And hopefully learn a few things and become a little smarter in the process.

And now for the evaluation angle: When evaluating the performance of a project, it is really important to ask why the goal was not achieved, as well as asking what was achieved. Don’t just focus on the binary succeeded/didn’t succeed parameter. Don’t pass judgement too quickly because a performance metric wasn’t achieved.

Naturally, it also comes down to how we define and measure achievement.  It’s hard not to be impressed by people who start their own businesses, run for high office, train for the Olympics, or get selected to play on your country’s World Cup team. On a CV, all those things look pretty good. But there is a lot of sweat and time that goes into reaching those goals.

And remember, most people who are, or seem, successful, have gone through many failures before they got there. Failure, is after all, the norm. So buck up, and go out there and try one more time.

Words we use to make things happen  
The information pyramid

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