The Antidote (18 page)

A parallel insight arises from Denrell's research into media commentators who make predictions about the future course of the economy. The ones who made the most extreme, headlinegrabbing predictions, Denrell and his colleague Christina Fang concluded, were just as likely to prove astonishingly wrong as astonishingly right. They weren't better forecasters; they just made riskier forecasts – while the media, which trumpeted their predictions and praised them when they were vindicated by events, rarely followed up on their failed forecasts. This is something you
might wish to consider before relying on such commentators when choosing where to invest your money.

It is worth bearing in mind, moreover, that virtually any advice about how to succeed, in life or work, is at constant risk of being undermined by survivor bias. We ignore or avoid failure so habitually that we rarely stop to consider all the people who may have followed any set of instructions for happiness or success – including those advanced in these pages – but then failed to achieve the result.

This is probably as good a time as any to tell you about my pubic louse.

I acquired the louse – just the one, though it was exceptionally large – in February 2001, at Greenwich in east London, at the site of the Millennium Dome, Britain's fabled monument to the dawn of the year 2000. The story of the dome is, notoriously, one of failure after failure: a financial catastrophe, a disaster in terms of visitor numbers, and the undoing of several prominent politicians' careers. By early 2001, the Millennium Experience, the exhibition that had occupied the interior of the 365-metre-wide marquee for the previous year, had ended. I had been sent, as a newspaper reporter, to witness the auction of the dome's contents, by means of which its now bankrupt operators hoped to recover some fraction of their lost millions. I had been given £100 of my employer's petty cash, in order to make a purchase for the purposes of entertaining journalism. The serious money, it was clear, was going to be spent on the company's computers, its high-tech lighting rigs and catering equipment, but everything was up for grabs – including the exhibits that had dominated the Dome's fourteen ‘zones', dedicated to such topics as Body, Mind, Faith, Work, Money and Play. The Body Zone was a giant
replica of a human body – bigger, we had often been told, than the Statue of Liberty – through which visitors (although not enough of them) had walked. Demonstrating an audacious refusal to flinch from the unpalatable realities of their subject, the body's designers had equipped it with several mechanised pubic lice. With my £100, I bought one. The others went to an antiques dealer from Surrey, who told me he planned to use them to scare his wife and children. A man must have a hobby.

A dome employee named Geoff came to help me extract my louse from the storeroom. ‘It's a bit sad, really,' he said, with what seemed to be real emotion. ‘I used to work with this guy.' I took the creature to the processing desk, as required, where another worker took it from me and handed me a slip of paper. I wouldn't be able to take it off the premises, she explained, until the auction was completed, in a few days' time. Rules were rules.

I returned to the office, louseless and in a reflective mood. The auction had felt like a public admission of the dome's defeat, and thus an appropriate end to the whole saga: sad, but also funny, and above all fitting. The sorry story of the dome is probably best encapsulated by Dan Howland, an expert on fairgrounds and amusement parks, who expresses it as follows in a monograph entitled
Dome and Domer:

From the moment it opened, it was clear that the Millennium Dome would be one of the grandest and most spectacular failures in exposition history. It was unpopular with both press and public, inaccessible, ill-conceived, poorly planned, mismanaged, and just generally dull. So much money was spent on the dome, and so much more shovelled in as the debacle continued, that Labour prime minister Tony Blair found his career hanging in the balance, while other Labour
officials found their careers hanging in tatters. The story of the Millennium Dome is a tale of honest mistakes, bad design, hubris, stupidity, greed, corruption – but above all, it's a tale of something so monumentally awful that it takes on a sort of soggy grandeur.

There is no need to rehearse each of these missteps here. Among the more famous lowlights were the New Year's Eve 1999 opening ceremony, when thousands of invited guests, including influential politicians and national newspaper editors, were forced to shiver outdoors for hours before being funnelled through the dome's hopelessly inadequate number of metal detectors; the bomb threat that almost forced the building's evacuation that night; and the attempted heist, later that year, during which a team of thieves smashed their way inside with a digger, and got halfway through executing the robbery of the world's second-largest flawless diamond, which they believed was inside. (Technically, this may not count as a low point for the dome, since the heist was thwarted; an informant had alerted the police, who had replaced the diamond with a replica, and were lying in wait.) The problems had started much earlier, though: in the years approaching the Millennium, many of the project's senior employees and consultants had resigned, and several chief executives had been fired. One of them subsequently told a parliamentary committee that the dome's highest-level staff had been on the verge of nervous breakdowns as 2000 approached, forcing him to hire a team of counsellors. The dome was so vast, we'd been informed, that it could hold 18,000 double-decker London buses. But the consensus among commentators seemed to be that ordering a large quantity of double-decker buses might have been a much better use of the more than £800 million that the project swallowed up.

The Millennium Dome, in other words, could hardly have been more of a catastrophe. And yet it also illustrated the extraordinary power of failure to bring people closer together. The atmosphere at the auction was surprisingly convivial – reflecting not just the
schadenfreude
of journalists, but an attitude that seemed to have accompanied the tale of the dome from the very beginning: a sort of affectionate popular embrace of the endeavour in all its haplessness. ‘It's a souvenir of a national disaster,' one attendee at the auction told me, explaining his presence there. ‘It's a very British thing to do, isn't it?' In the months following the auction, as politicians and commentators debated what should become of the now-empty dome, the columnist Ros Coward ably captured this bittersweet British fondness for its failure. This was not joy at the misfortune of others so much as a perverse pride in belonging to the nation whose failure the dome had been:

The dome has a clear brand, and that brand is Disaster. It cries out to be exploited as a grand folly, an emblem of muddle, hype and plain foolishness with enormous entertainment potential … We've become fond of the building we love to hate, the great folly, with all the entertainment it has provided, stumbling from crisis to disaster. Something about it chimes with the British character. We're good at disasters, at not taking ourselves seriously and delighting when things go magnificently and foolishly wrong. This is the key to its future. It should become a museum of disasters and follies, a history of doomed projects or unfortunate accidents.

That never happened, of course. These days, the dome is the O2 arena, a concert venue that occasionally plays host to stadium-sized motivational seminars.

A few days after the auction, I returned to Greenwich to collect my pubic louse, but it was nowhere to be found. The dome employee who helped me look for it was apologetic, but not surprised. Even in attempting to sell off its contents, the dome proved a failure. Over the next few years, I received sporadic letters from the accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers, who were handling the bankruptcy, implying that one day – presumably after more important creditors had been recompensed – I might get my newspaper's £100 back.

I'm still waiting.

This half-embrace of failure, as Coward suggests, is something the British like to think of as distinctly British. We celebrate Captain Scott's failed and fatal effort to be first to the South Pole; we cherish the spirit of the Dunkirk evacuation more than the triumph of victory. ‘To all those who have written terrible books on success,' wrote the (British) journalist Stephen Pile in his 1979 bestseller (in Britain)
The Book of Heroic Failures,
‘I dedicate this terrible book on how it's perfectly all right to be incompetent … because I am, and so is everyone I know.' To citizens of the success-oriented United States, the fondness for failure can seem like a more generally European eccentricity, frequently attributed to the end of empire. ‘Musing over failure is not a particularly American activity,' writes the journalist Neil Steinberg. ‘Sure, it's big in Europe, where every nation, at one time or another, has had a lock on greatness, only to fritter it away smothering monster palaces in gold leaf and commissioning jeweled Fabergé eggs by the dozen. England had her empire; Spain, her Armada; France, her Napoleon; Germany, its unspeakable zenith. Even Belgium had a moment of glory – though, true,
things haven't been quite the same since the death of Charles the Bold in 1477. For those nations, remembering and bitterly analysing greatness are [just] about their only connection to it anymore. Why do you think they have all those pubs and outdoor cafés?'

But we should not write off the embrace of failure as a culturally specific quirk; in the context of the ‘negative path' to happiness, there is more to say. We have seen already how a willingness to fail, and to analyse past failures, can be crucial to understanding achievement and success. But a more deeply counterintuitive possibility is that there is happiness to be found in embracing failure
as
failure, not just as a path to success – that welcoming it might simply feel better than perpetually struggling to avoid it.

There is an openness and honesty in failure, a down-to-earth confrontation with reality that is lacking at the higher altitudes of success. To achieve something impressive – as might have happened had the dome ever become, as Tony Blair predicted, ‘a beacon to the world' – is necessarily to erect a kind of barrier between yourself and everyone else. To be impressed by something, meanwhile, implies feeling yourself to be in the presence of something different from, and better than, yourself. Failure, by contrast, collapses these boundaries, demonstrating the fallibility of those who might otherwise try to present themselves as immune to defeat. It cuts people down to human size. The vulnerability revealed by failure can nurture empathy and communality. Do you feel more or less connection to the people who ran the dome to learn that they had been on the brink of emotional collapse? The answer, surely, is more. Had the dome been a triumphant success, it would have been unthinkable for a reporter to have had the conversations I found myself having with its
employees, who would have been uptight and wary, instructed not to communicate with the media except in ways that might burnish the brand. ‘Psychologically, I suppose, it's healthy,' said one security guard, who was keeping watch over four life-sized mannequins in surgical dress that would eventually sell for £320. ‘We've come to the funeral, we've buried the body, and we're grieving.' Failure is a relief. At last you can say what you think.

Still, it can be exceptionally hard to adopt this attitude towards your own failures. As Christopher Kayes's notion of ‘goalodicy' suggests, we too often make our goals into parts of our identities, so that failure becomes an attack on who we are. Or, as Albert Ellis understood, we alight upon some desired outcome – being happily married, for example, or finding fulfilling work – and elevate it into one we feel we
must
attain, so that failing at it becomes not just sad but catastrophic. To use the Buddhist language of attachment and non-attachment, we become attached to success.

All these counterproductive ways of thinking about failure manifest themselves most acutely in the phenomenon of perfectionism. This is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not so secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw – yet perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live. (There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.) To fully embrace the experience of failure, not merely to tolerate it as a stepping-stone to success, is to abandon this constant straining never to put a foot wrong. It is to relax. ‘Downfall', writes the American Zen Buddhist Natalie Goldberg, ‘brings us to the ground, facing the nitty-gritty, things as they are with no glitter. Success cannot last forever. Everyone's time runs
out.' She goes on: ‘Achievement solidifies us. Believing we are invincible, we want more and more.' To see and feel things as they really are, ‘we have to crash. Only then can we drop through to a more authentic self. Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose.'

Fortunately, it may be possible to cultivate some of this attitude towards failure without reaching the rarefied heights of Buddhist enlightenment. The work of the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck suggests that our experiences of failure are influenced overwhelmingly by the implicit beliefs we hold about the nature of talent and ability – and that we can, perhaps quite easily, nudge ourselves in the direction of a more healthy outlook.

Each of us can be placed somewhere on a continuum, Dweck argues, depending on our ‘implicit view' – or unspoken attitude – about what talent is and where it comes from. Those with a ‘fixed theory' assume that ability is innate; those with an ‘incremental theory' believe that it evolves through challenge and hard work. If you're the kind of person who struggles mightily to avoid the experience of failure, it's likely that you reside near the ‘fixed' end of Dweck's continuum. ‘Fixed theory' people tend to approach challenges as occasions on which they are called upon to demonstrate their innate abilities, and so they find failure especially horrifying: to them, it's a sign that they tried to show how good they were, but didn't measure up. The classic example of a person with a ‘fixed theory' is the young sports star who is encouraged to think of himself as a ‘natural' – but who then fails to put in sufficient practice to realise his potential. If talent is innate, his unspoken reasoning goes, then why bother?