Behind The Scenes of #RedefiningFailure Campaign
Failure is bad, and success is good: that is what we’re used to hearing from a young age. However, on October 13, people in Finland created International Day for Failure, putting a twist to the norm and celebrating the importance of failing and trying new things. Calm Collective also ran its first Linkedin Marketing Campaign, #RedefiningFailure on this day to break the stigma and shame around failure across Asia. Accompanying this campaign was a video that featured people across age groups to talk about their perceptions and experiences of failure. I joined the team as a video creator intern in June and worked on this project from the start to the end, and this is a short summary of how it went.
Where the idea came from
Initially, we had centred around the idea of success as the main takeaway. We wanted people to be proud of how far they’ve come and celebrated all the effort and growth they have achieved. However, as we ventured further into the topic, it suddenly dawned on us that failure is a cardinal aspect of success. If you scroll through social media, we see success stories everywhere, but no one is really looking at the other spectrum of it. Failure is uncomfortable because it makes us feel that we’re inadequate, that our efforts have gone down the drain. Sometimes, we equate a failure to do something like a measure of our self-worth, and though perhaps, we’ve failed for reasons beyond our control, we think we’ve become failures ourselves. To openly air our failures makes us even more uncomfortable
However, failure is part of growth because it teaches us to learn from our mistakes. Success without failure is learning about the right mix to always do it right. But life has its ups and downs, failure is inevitable, and it’s just impossible to do it right all the time. Instead of escaping from the possibility of failing, what if we take a step closer in embracing failures? Could we shift our perceptions of the seemingly dichotomous relationship between success and failure to one that is more analogous?
That’s when the concept of redefining failures and celebrating small wins came about.
Acknowledging the small wins
When we were interviewing different age groups for the video campaign, it was interesting to watch how the art of celebrating our wins disappears with increasing age. I remember being a child who was happy and proud of the smallest things I’ve done. It could just be as simple as drawing something I never thought I could on paper. As we grow older, many of us have lost the ability to give credit to ourselves where it’s due. Perhaps, this is closely intertwined with our Asian culture of being humble. We brush our successes and growth of as having that extra stroke of luck or giving credit to others but not to ourselves. I find it especially hard to celebrate my wins. It’s almost instinctive to laugh it off and mentally discredit myself for my efforts and then eventually, I think I’m not making any progress.
What are small wins anyway? Someone used to tell me that small wins could be anything you make it out to be. While these may not be as grand as ticking a major life goal off the list, these are baby steps towards working on oneself. You choose and define what they are and celebrate them with child-like excitement. Think, what are some of your recent small wins?
The power of sharing our vulnerabilities
With the goal of normalising hard conversations about failure in mind, we proceeded to make a video about redefining failure, then asked people to share their stories of failure on Linkedin, a platform where successes about promotions, new jobs, and accolades are favoured. The biggest takeaway from this campaign was realising how impactful showing vulnerability can be. Accompanying the video were the highly personal and vulnerable anecdotes being shared, and for those few days, #RedefiningFailure connected people. We were heartened to see comments from people saying that these stories were just what they needed to hear at this moment. We really appreciate every story that our participants have shared and know that this had as much of an impact on others as it did for us.
Facing my own fear of failure
When I was first given the role to take on the video project, I was excited because I’ve never taken on something like this as a lead. I am someone who is comfortable learning from the sidelines and entrusting the more important roles to people who have more experience and could do a better job than me. Ironically, I was fearing the possibility of failing with this project. When I first proposed the idea, waves of self-doubt hit me.
“So now I’m going to create content out of something that I was still struggling with … can I really do this?”
It suddenly felt like a personal project to redefine my own perceptions of failure and welcome the little bits of growth that would tag along.
After a few months of planning, filming and editing, here is our final product
So how would you redefine your failures?