There’s something peculiarly Australian about our approach to failure. We’re simultaneously proud of our ability to “have a go” while being quick to “take the piss” out of tall poppies who crash and burn. It’s a cultural paradox that doesn’t quite add up, and frankly, it’s worth unpacking.
I was struck by this contradiction again while listening to a recent conversation between David Duchovny and Adam Grant on Grant’s “ReThinking” podcast. Duchovny—actor, novelist, director, and now podcast host himself—offered a perspective on failure that feels both refreshingly honest and strangely subversive in our “hustle culture” era.
The Schadenfreude Economy
Before diving into Duchovny’s wisdom, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: our cultural addiction to others’ failures. It’s become something of a social currency. Whether it’s a former Yellow Wiggle who’s reportedly run through her fortune, or a tech startup founder whose house of cards has spectacularly collapsed, we consume these stories with an appetite that borders on the unseemly.
As Duchovny pointedly observes: “It’s really our inability to accept our own failures that makes us such a schadenfreude kind of a culture.”
The Daily Mail and its algorithmic cousins serve up these failures with clockwork reliability, wrapped in a veneer of journalistic neutrality that barely disguises the underlying message: “Look at this poor bastard. Aren’t you glad it’s not you?”
But here’s where it gets interesting.
Failure as Connective Tissue
Duchovny offers a perspective that turns conventional wisdom on its head: “Failure gives you many brothers and sisters, and failure creates empathy.”
While success can isolate—placing you on a pedestal that separates you from the crowd—failure connects you to the universal human experience. It’s the great leveller, the shared language we all reluctantly speak.
Think about your own business journey for a moment. Which experiences have connected you most deeply with peers and mentors? I’d wager it wasn’t the runaway successes but rather the hard-won wisdom following a campaign that flopped, a product that tanked, or a partnership that dissolved.
The Delusion of Strategic Failure
Let’s be clear about something: I’m not advocating for what I call “strategic failure”—that peculiar Silicon Valley notion that we should “fail fast, fail often” as if failure were some badge of entrepreneurial honour to be collected like a Boy Scout merit badge.
That’s just success culture wearing failure drag.
Real failure—the kind that keeps you awake at 3 AM questioning your life choices—doesn’t need to be sought out. As Duchovny puts it: “Success is a terrible thing to happen to anybody… Success is not a teacher. Success is something else.”
The real value lies not in courting failure but in how we metabolise it when it inevitably finds us.
The Finish Line Fallacy
One of the most profound insights from the conversation came via Duchovny quoting his friend, the late comedian Garry Shandling: “People that say ‘nice guys finish last’ don’t know where the finish line is.”
This strikes at the heart of how we frame success and failure in business. We’ve become obsessed with arbitrary metrics—social media followers, website traffic, quarterly growth—often at the expense of more meaningful indicators like customer loyalty, team wellbeing, and sustainable practices.
If your finish line is merely “beating the competition” or “maximising shareholder value,” you’ve placed it in entirely the wrong race.
Translating Failure into Business Wisdom
How might we apply these reflections to our business practices? Let me suggest a few starting points:
- Create space for failure stories. If your team only shares successes, you’re missing half the picture. The most innovative businesses have rituals for examining failures without blame.
- Question your metrics. Are you measuring what truly matters, or just what’s easy to count? Revenue matters, certainly, but so does customer retention, employee satisfaction, and community impact.
- Develop failure resilience. Duchovny’s approach to his film “House of D” bombing is instructive: “I just kept working for one, I didn’t give up, I just kept moving forward.” Simple advice, profoundly difficult to follow.
- Reframe your narrative. As Duchovny notes: “Real mental health and spiritual health, and even physical health comes from the way in which we tell the stories of our lives to ourselves and to those around us.” This isn’t about delusion—it’s about finding the learning within the loss.
The Brotherhood and Sisterhood of the Failed
There’s something liberating in embracing the universality of failure. None of us escapes it. Even someone like Duchovny, whose success most would envy, speaks freely about his professional disasters and what they taught him.
The question isn’t whether you’ll fail—you will—but whether those failures will isolate or connect you; whether they’ll embitter or enrich you.
As the conversation between Grant and Duchovny suggests, perhaps the most meaningful success isn’t avoiding failure but developing the capacity to fail with grace, learn with humility, and continue with renewed purpose.
Or as I like to put it, slightly less eloquently: sometimes you need to wear the L hat. Just make sure it’s not the only hat in your wardrobe!