difficult to try new things or take risks for fear of immediate public opprobrium. A good friend of mine, Jim, was a civil rights lawyer in America in the 1960s, when he took on cases that he had no hope of winning because it was morally the right thing to do. Lately, he has been dispirited to see that the newly qualified lawyers he mentors are too scared to fight cases that are not guaranteed a successful verdict.
‘And I say to them: take a shot, at least! You’ve got to fail to figure out what to do right,’ Jim said to me one evening over dinner. ‘Who cares what other people think? When you’re on a desert island and you’re on your own, struggling to survive, will you give a fuck what someone else thinks? No! You’ll be too busy trying to make a fire with a magnifying glass and waving down a passing ship so you don’t die.’
But Jim’s students have grown up in an era where failure is viewed as the end point, not a necessary staging post on a journey towards greater success, and in a culture where everyone is entitled and encouraged to form knee-jerk hot takes and offer multi-platform critiques. At just the point when success has become the all-consuming aspiration, shame is now a public condition. No wonder these students felt hamstrung. No wonder we want to shy away from admitting to our mistakes or our wrong decisions.
And yet the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to pay tribute to my failures for making me who I am. Although going through negative experiences is never pleasant, I’m grateful for it because in retrospect, I can see that I have made different, better decisions because of them. I can see that I have become stronger.
That was the genesis of How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, a podcast where I asked ‘successful’ people about what they’d learned from failure. The premise was simple: I would ask each interviewee to provide me with three instances where they believed they had failed. They could choose anything from bad dates and failed driving tests to job losses and divorce. The beauty of this was that the interviewees were in control of what they chose to discuss, and as a result would hopefully be less reticent to open up. I was also aware that the choices each guest made would, in themselves, be revealing.
After seventeen years spent interviewing celebrities for newspapers and magazines, I felt a thrilling liberation at the prospect of not having to write the encounter up at the behest of a particular editor who wanted a particular angle. I would record as live, for about forty-five minutes to an hour, and I would let the interview stand on its own: as an honest conversation about subjects that don’t often get a lot of airplay.
When the first episode of the podcast went live, it attracted thousands of listeners overnight. The second saw it catapult to number three in the iTunes chart – above My Dad Wrote a Porno, Serial and Desert Island Discs. By the end of eight episodes, I had somehow accumulated 200,000 downloads and a book deal. I was receiving dozens of messages every day from extraordinary people going through difficult things, saying how much the podcast had helped them.
The woman who had been told at fifteen she would never be able to have children.
The advertising executive signed off work with chronic fatigue.
The person I had once interviewed for a newspaper who got in touch to tell me that his mother was in intensive care after a stem cell transplant and nine days of chemotherapy and that she could barely breathe or talk, but she listened to my podcast because it calmed her down. ‘It makes things so much better,’ he wrote and I read his message while making toast and burst into tears. The toast burned.
The university professor who said it brought home to him the realities of female infertility and that he was now able to understand his wife and daughters more fully.
The twenty-something student who messaged to ask if she could help in any way that I needed because she believed in the idea so much.
The ones who told me they felt less alone, less ashamed, less sad, less exposed.
The ones who told me they felt more able to cope, more positive, more understood.
The ones who told me about suicidal thoughts in the past; who confided in me about episodes of depression; who spoke to me about their lives with an honesty I was honoured to be thought worthy of.
All these people listened. All these people connected with the idea, so elegantly expressed by Arthur Russell in the chorus of ‘Love Comes Back’ that ‘being sad is not a crime’ and that failure contains more meaningful lessons than straightforward success.
It was overwhelming and emotional. I was moved and also quietly surprised at what a chord it seemed to be striking. I had long believed that being honest about one’s vulnerability was the root of real strength, but that message was resonating in a way I had never imagined it would.
The podcast is, without doubt, the single most successful thing I have ever done. I’m aware of the irony. Other people were too. One of my friends started prefacing each text to me with ‘Noted failure, Elizabeth Day’. There were some commentators who argued that having a succession of famous people on the podcast to bemoan lost cricket matches (Sebastian Faulks) or embarrassing one-night stands (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) was an egregious form of humble-bragging.
Their argument seemed to be that if a person ended up successful, then they couldn’t possibly have experienced real, all-consuming failure. Why didn’t I have guests on the podcast who were in the grip of current failure? Or why couldn’t I just leave everyone alone to fail in their own way, without being made to feel bad about the fact that they weren’t failing as well as they could be? Wasn’t failure just something to get on and deal with rather than talk about?
To which my response is, it’s not that I’m actively advocating failure. It’s that we will all experience it at some juncture in our lives and that instead of fearing failure as a calamity from which it is impossible to recover, maybe we can build up the muscle of our emotional resilience by learning from others. That way, the next time something goes wrong, we are better equipped to deal with it. When you hear a successful person – someone who, from afar, might seem to have everything – be open about their failures, it is inclusive, not exclusive. Especially when you hear these people talk about depression or about their careers taking wrong turns or about failed relationships, because so many of us will go through the same things and worry that they will define us negatively.
Nor am I saying that all failures can be easily assimilated. There are some things that one can never get over, let alone want to talk about. There are also many areas in which I have absolutely no first-hand knowledge. I’m acutely aware, as I write this book, that I am in no way an expert and cannot offer the reader anything other than my own lived experience. I am a privileged, white, middle-class woman in a world pockmarked by racism, inequality and poverty. I do not know what it is like to experience daily micro-aggressions or to be spat at in the street or passed over for a job promotion because of the colour of my skin. I have no idea what it is like to exist on the minimum wage, to be a refugee, to be disabled, to have serious health issues or to live in a dictatorship where freedom of speech is not allowed. I am not a parent or a man or a homeowner and cannot talk with confidence about any of these topics. For me to attempt to do so would be patronising and offensive, so for that reason, the following chapters are founded on personal understanding, with deep respect for my intersectional sisters and brothers. What follows is simply one version of failure. Maybe you can relate to some of it. Maybe you have your own. Maybe one day I’ll get to hear it.
I’ve learned a lot from doing the podcast, and from writing this book. One of the things that I found particularly interesting when I started approaching potential guests was how differently men and women viewed failure. All of the women immediately connected with the idea and all of them – bar one – claimed they had so many failures to choose from, they weren’t sure how to whittle it down to the requisite three.
