Name: Lessons Learned From Failure with Elizabeth Day
Uploaded: 2020-09-20T19:10:12.000Z
Duration: 7 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Elizabeth Day: All of us fail in myriad ways almost

every single day and yet, we live in an age where it

is very difficult to be honest about failure, where

it seems as if everyone else is nailing their life.

filters and it can feel quite lonely sometimes to be vulnerable.

Because not only do we learn more about who we are, but we're

able to connect on a very human level with other people.

In October 2017, a long-term relationship came to an end.

and it was three weeks before my 39th birthday.

I face my 39th birthday was something akin to trepidation because I was

in no way where I have thought I would be at that stage in my life.

During my 30s, I had had a very busy time.

I had two unsuccessful rounds of IVF and a miscarriage at three months.

When I look back at my 30s, I realized that they

had been a decade of some professional success.

I was lucky enough to make my living as a journalist, but they had been

a decade also of immense personal transition and personal sadness.

At the back of this relationship ending, I took myself

to LA, which is a very good place to go to lick your

wounds because it's sunny and the time difference means

that you don't get that many emails after 2 P.M.

It was while I was in LA that I find myself listening to a lot of

podcasts because, as anyone who has ever been heartbroken will

know, when you're in that state of mind, every single pop song

seems to have a peculiar, a specific resonance to your heartbreak.

One of the podcasts I was listening to was

She is a fantastic relationship therapist and she basically opens up

the door to her consulting room during the course of this podcast.

You get a bird's eye view of relationships

At the same time as I was listening to this

podcast, I was having the most incredible

conversations with my predominantly female friends

about what it meant to have loved and lost

and what we had learned from various heartbreak,

and where we were professionally and what

this meant, and what it meant not to have

children when one had always thought one would.

failures and I began to see that each one had

taught me something so valuable about who

It had been a nudge from the universe in a slightly different direction.

I started to wonder how great it would be if we could open up those

For the first eight guests, I really corralled a lot of

friends and contacts and got them to do it as a favor.

Three instances in their life where they felt

that things haven't gone according to plan.

They could range from the seemingly superficial, bad dates,

failed driving tests, lost tennis matches to the more profound.

It is a great honor now to listen to those people

stories because the topics we've discussed

include living with depression, homelessness,

death by suicide, failed family relationships.

It really has been the most beautiful journey of discovery.

Those first eight episodes I put out into

the world genuinely thinking that maybe half

those people would probably be my parents.

I sold my wedding dress on eBay to fund the first few episodes.

I drew my own logo with felt-tip pens, as you

can probably tell if you've ever seen it.

Anyway, How To Fail went out there in July 2018 and within

three weeks, it was number three on the iTunes chart.

It was, ironically, the most successful thing I have ever done.

Elizabeth: It's been a really incredible thing, this journey,

because it's made me realize how much we were all thirsting to talk

about failure and how alone so many people feel in their failures

and how ashamed they feel of acknowledging them in public.

One of the most inspiring guests I've ever had on

the podcast is a man called Johnny Benjamin, who

is not a household name, but is a phenomenal mental health campaigner.

When Johnny was 20, he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.

Shortly afterwards, he found himself standing on

the edge of Waterloo Bridge, about to take his own life.

The pain had got so great that he could see no other way out.

It was at that moment that a stranger walked past him