There's Nothing in Success

After trying to convince radio host Howard Stern that he wasn’t born a good singer, Ed Sheeran offered up some cold hard sonic evidence. He had them pull up a YouTube video of him singing when he was fourteen years old. They played it right there in the interview. It starts out not half bad, but pretty soon it gets hard to listen to.

Ed Sheeran listening to a song he wrote when he was fourteen.

“You weren’t kidding,” Stern says.

“No I wasn’t.” Sheeran goes on, “This is what I play to kids, and I’m like, look, this is me at fourteen. I wrote The A Teamat eighteen. So four years later, I made The A Team and recorded it. And in four years, I learned harmony, I learned how to sing in tune, I learned how to perform, I learned how to do it in time, and you can do it.”

Stern asks him how it was that he learned all these things. Was it from performing? From being on stage?

Sheeran’s answer: failing.

“Yeah, failing. Time and time again. You learn nothing from success. Nothing. You learn everything from the failures. And this is the thing that annoys me about the state that the world is in in the moment. No one talks about failure anymore. Whereas with success everyone shouts about it. But there’s nothing in success. Success happens from failing hundreds of times.”

Joshua Waitzkin, who we wrote about last week, learned the same lesson when he first started training Tai Chi push hands. His teacher, Master Chen, called it investment in loss.

“Working with Chen’s advanced students, I was thrown all over the place. They were too fast for me, and their attacks felt like heat-seeking missiles. When I neutralized one foray, the next came from out of nowhere and I went flying. Every day, he taught me new Tai Chi principles and refined my body mechanics and technical understanding. I felt like a soft piece of clay being molded into shape.” (The Art of Learning, 107)

To learn from failure, you need intelligent reps and no ego.

Intelligent reps means that you don’t just fail the same way, but learn from your mistakes.

“I have long believed,” Waitzkin writes, “that if a student of virtually any discipline could avoid ever repeating the same mistake twice—both technical and psychological—he or she would skyrocket to the top of their field.” (108)

Never repeating a mistake is impossible. But intelligent reps means that you reflect on your performance, accept coaching, and improve little by little over time.

The second thing you need is to let go of your need to look smart and put together. You need to have no ego.

“It’s clear that if in the beginning I had needed to look good to satisfy my ego, then I would have avoided that opportunity and all the pain that accompanied it.” (112)

Like Sheeran and Waitzkin, you have to seek growth in spite of failure. To invest in loss and turn the failures into intelligent reps.

There’s nothing in success.

It is in the failures that you learn to grow.