Hi, everyone.
My name is Elena Kon.
I'm a Software Engineer at Google.
And today I'm going to talk a bit about failure,
why I think it's important, and how to embrace
it to become more awesome.
We all want to be awesome.
We all want to win at life.
And we all want to be successful.
But how do we get there?
Often, our first reflex is to be careful.
We say to ourselves, I'm going to try and get this right
the first time, once I'm good enough.
But the road to success is almost never a smooth one.
In fact, it's usually pretty bumpy.
No matter how careful we are, only
by failing over and over and over again,
do we eventually succeed.
So if we want to be successful, it
is critical that instead of avoiding it,
we learn how to deal with and embrace failure.
Confidence is a key part of our ability to embrace failure.
An article titled "The Confidence Gap,"
that I recently read made me think
more of why some people like the confidence needed to succeed.
The article tries to explain the observation
that women lack the same level of confidence
as their male counterparts.
It boldly states that, "If life were one long grade school,
women would be the undisputed rulers of the world."
What this means is that girls do just as well as
boys in school-- by some measures, even better.
But as soon as we're done with school
and released out into the real world,
we struggle to keep up with boys' success-- especially
with the level of confidence that they exhibit.
This is explained by the fact that girls come into school
with a developmental advantage, making it easier
for them to behave.
They then get praised a lot for being perfect.
In turn, they begin to crave this approval that
causes them to avoid failure and take fewer risks.
Boys also tend to get a lot more scolding,
as studies show that in the classroom,
boys were observed to get eight times
more criticism than girls.
Naturally, boys learn to take failure with stride.
Furthermore, boys toughen each other up outside
of the classroom.
They tease each other, point out each others' limitations,
and call each other butt-heads and morons.
This makes such criticism lose a lot of its power.
This playground mentality encourages them later as men,
to let other people's tough remarks slide off their backs.
The result of this upbringing is that girls avoid taking risks,
because they're more fearful of failure.
When they do take risks, they're not
as experienced and prepared as boys to deal
with the potential failure.
So when they do fail, they're typically more
negatively affected by it.
This in turn causes them to be even more apprehensive to take
risks in the future.
But being able to overcome failure
that is typical of the result of taking risk,
is essential for confidence building.
While we can't go back in time to change the past,
to take more risks and make more mistakes,
we can hopefully try to reverse some of the habits that make us
more risk averse I want to start by providing some context,
and setting the stage for how I got interested
in this topic, how I failed many, many times,
and how I've learned to deal with failure,
appreciate it, and use it to build up my confidence,
to help me take more risks.
My first undisputed, very public failure in life,
was when I got a an F on a calculus pop quiz
that I was entirely unprepared for.
This freaked me out so much, that it
kicked me into high gear and motivated me to study.
As a result, for the next test in this class, I got 108%.
Yes, there were some bonus questions.
When I later reflected on this experience,
I realized that failing this quiz actually inspired
and motivated me to work harder to try to succeed.
I found a silver lining here.
I had discovered this intrinsic motivating force
that could help propel me through difficult times.
Ever since that experience, I've become much better
at dealing with failure.
Instead of getting stuck at step one, being upset,
I'm able to pretty quickly jump to step two, where
I get super excited about what is to follow; the purposeful,
hopefully rewarding hard work.
If we take some time to reflect, we
can all probably think of many times when we failed.
And all of us over time have learned
to deal with failure in one way or another.
Some people need space to recover,
and others are able to laugh it off.
But what if we could harness that failure to succeed?
The key idea that I want to point out here,
is that if we re-frame these failures that
are potential precursors to success, then
we can use that to build up our confidence.
Beyond the idea of just re-wiring your brain,
I do hope to leave you with some more practical,
hopefully easy to implement tips and tricks to embrace failure.
The first is to minimize the risk.
Set small milestones that are independent of external factors
like people or particular events.
For example, when I was interviewing for jobs,
one time I set a small milestone to look
into the interviewer's eyes when communicating with them.
I had a really hard time doing that,
and was trying to improve it at the time.
So I did it.
And despite not getting the job, I
was actually really proud of my small accomplishment.
Another way to minimize risk is to anticipate problems
and prepare for them.
Whenever I encounter an ambitious problem or situation,
I try to imagine what Batman would do.
It's widely known that given enough prep time,
Batman could win any fight.
I want to be the same way.
After spending a few years in the tech industry,
I decided I wanted to switch jobs.
But before I began interviewing, I
spent weeks relearning CS concept and practicing
problems.
Feeling prepared when I came to interviews
gave me the confidence I needed to calmly tackle problems
that I was not at all familiar with.
The next thing is to find the silver lining.
When I competed in swing dancing, often
I wouldn't win first place.
But being put on the spot to the something cool
with the audience watching and cheering you on,
gives you the adrenaline and encouragement
to try some really creative moves that fit the music.
So oftentimes I would get one or two great new moves
from competing, that I could take with me
and developed later, and potentially
use again in competition when it's been perfected.
This was a huge win for me.
Finally, pat yourself on the back heavily and often.
The idea here is that doing so helps
strengthen the connection between success and failure,
and gets you the courage when you're
contemplating taking a risk.
One thing I do is I keep an 'I'm awesome'
email label and folder.
I put 'thank you' and 'congratulation' emails there,
my performance review, any great ideas,
and anything else I can associate with success.
Whenever I'm sad because I just failed
or hesitant to try something new,
I go and look at this folder and remember
all of my accomplishments.
And more importantly, I remember all of the failures
that it took to get there, and think to myself, yeah,
I am awesome.
And pretty much instantaneously, feel better and encouraged
to try something new.
While a large part of my talk was focused on women building
confidence, as you may have realized by now,
these tips aren't just relevant to women.
But really could be used by any person of any age.
So now that hopefully you've thought
about re-framing failures as a precursor to success,
and have some ideas on how to deal with failure,
go create your 'awesome' folder, and try something new that you
think may be rewarding but take you outside of your comfort
zone, like that dance class, or that project at work
no one will touch.
And start filling up your 'awesome' folder
with accomplishments, to help you accomplish even more.
Thank you.