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.
‘Yes, I am very good at failing because I think I take risks and I push myself to try new things,’ said the political campaigner Gina Miller. ‘And when you do that, you open yourself up to failure, but it’s a way of really living life … In life we’re all going to fail, and my view is you’ve just got to get used to it. It’s going to happen, so you might as well have a strategy for how you deal with failure, and then once you’ve got that in your back pocket, you can go out in life and really take risks.’
Most of the men (but by no means all) would respond saying they weren’t sure they had failed and maybe they weren’t quite the right guest for this particular podcast.
There’s science behind this: the amygdalae, the brain’s primitive fear centres which help to process emotional memory and respond to stressful situations, have been shown to be activated more easily in reaction to negative emotional stimuli in women than in men. As a result, this suggests that women are more likely than men to form strong emotional memories of negative events or to ruminate more over things that have gone wrong in the past. The anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that helps us recognise errors and weigh options, is also larger in women.
The knock-on effect of this, according to Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book The Confidence Code, is that women routinely fall victim to their own self-doubt: ‘Compared with men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions; they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities.’
If women felt more able to own their failures, I suspect this would change. I certainly had my own mind blown when the author Sebastian Faulks told me that failure was all a matter of perception. Before our podcast interview, he sent me a playful email outlining his failures as:
‘… the time my friend Simon and I lost the final of the over-40s doubles and had to be content