How do you achieve epic failure?
It’s quite simple. You take an ordinary failure and convert it into an epic.
It’s as easy as A-B-C, in fact.
The A-B-C method for epic failure
Albert Ellis, founder of Rational-Emotive Therapy, came up with what he called the A-B-C method. It comes in three parts:
- The Activating Event (the thing that actually happened)
- Belief (how you think about the thing that happened)
- Consequence (the results, particularly the emotional results)
We think that A causes C, but – Ellis pointed out – it’s really B that causes C. There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.
We make our own failures epic based on the significance we assign to them.
Bad romance
For example, I was in love with this girl. Ordinary enough girl, no special distinguishing features, but to me, at the time, the love of my life, with whom all of my future plans were entangled.
She didn’t see it that way.
Epic failure!
Because I had the old song running in my head: “If I can’t have my Cindy, I’ll have no girl at all.” (Her name wasn’t Cindy. I substituted her real name into the song. Yes, it actually was running through my head, I’m not using a figure of speech.)
All of a sudden, because I’d taken the whole situation – and myself- so seriously, a perfectly ordinary romantic rejection, of which millions happen every day, had become The End of Life as I Knew It. I was going to be alone forever, I was worthless and unattractive, and so on and so forth. Cue string orchestra, minor key, fortissimo.
It’s easy for me now to mock my younger self and his drama, but at the time it was as real as sunrise (and felt about as much under my control). The fact that I can joke about it now is one of the primary ways that I know I’m over it.
How to increase your unhappiness using mind power alone
Another therapeutic pioneer, Aaron T. Beck, the founder of Cognitive Therapy, developed a theory that people made themselves unhappy through distorted thinking.
He identified in his patients automatic thoughts like “If I’m going to be happy I have to succeed in everything I attempt,” or “I can’t live without being loved.”
He also identified “processing errors” like magnifying small problems into large ones; catastrophizing (“this thing going wrong is Ultimate Tragedy! I’m doomed!”); dichotomous thinking (“I’m either a success at this or a failure at everything”); and overgeneralising (“this happened, so it will always happen”).
I had all of those. I was really good at making myself miserable.
Now, I obviously wasn’t choosing to make myself miserable (not at any level of consciousness that I would label “choosing”, anyway). Nevertheless, my choices, and the thoughts I was having, resulted inevitably in misery.
I was miserable because I had made my love story epic. I’d read too much classic literature (I was fresh from an English degree, after all). I had given immense emotional weight to a particular outcome that I didn’t control, and when I didn’t get that outcome, all of that emotional investment was suddenly lost. Woe was Mike.
photo credit: andres.moreno
You can’t always get what you want – can you?
The thing that stops you from getting what you really want is the thing that you think you want.
In my case, what I thought I wanted was a relationship with one particular woman.
What I really wanted was an intimate connection with someone who understood and appreciated me.
I wasn’t going to get what I really wanted until I let go of what I thought I wanted. That was just the reality of the situation, and as long as I didn’t recognise that and kept pouring emotional energy into one particular way of getting what I wanted, I was just building a massive disappointment structure for myself – and closing off other possibilities that may have been more fruitful.
What about passion?
What I’ve written above almost sounds like I’m against passion. I’m not.
I’m completely for passion. Passion has achieved almost everything that’s worth achieving. Caring deeply about a cause, a person, a goal, a principle – it can bring transformation, and transformation is what I’m all about here.
William Wilberforce had a passion to abolish slavery in the British Empire. Florence Nightingale had a passion to improve nursing. Those passions sustained them through years of opposition, hard work and disappointment and immeasurably improved the lives of millions to this day.
But so often we see passion causing devastation and grief instead. Watch some footage of dictators, terrorists, haters. Very passionate people. What makes the difference?
To me, it’s ego. Now, I’m not saying that people who achieve great things through their passion are egoless saints, while people who cause great harm are focussed entirely on themselves. It’s not that simple.
It’s that the great achievers don’t take every opposition and setback personally. They don’t pour their energy into defending themselves and their position against all comers. They don’t demonise their opponents because they’re unable to accept any resemblance to themselves. They can accept a loss or a delay or a denial, because their idea of winning is larger than getting exactly what they planned at every step.
And, of course, it’s not all about them. They’re happy to share credit, share the benefits, and work for the good of people they’ve never met, because they’re not the supporting pillar and central point of their own universe. They have a larger vision.
That’s what I mean by not taking yourself seriously. Not just that you can joke about yourself, but that what you want is not so crucially important that it becomes epic just because you want it.
Another word for it is a sense of perspective.
Action Now
So here are some questions for you.
- Is there a great disappointment in your life, something you’ve never fully recovered from? Write it down.
- How can you rethink it so that it’s just itself and not the prime example of why you’ll never be happy?
- Can you mentally pull back from it and put it into perspective as a single setback in a much larger context? Shrink it all the way down?
- What did you really want in that situation, as opposed to what you thought you wanted? Do you still really want that?
- Write down some things you learned from the situation about how not to get what you want.
- If that past experience was just a thing that happened and not an epic failure, what would that mean for the future? What could you try now?
- How can you hold the outcome lightly for any one attempt, while still being committed to, and passionate about, your ultimate goal?
This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.
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