Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Gwyneth Paltrow and the art of messing up

LONDON — Poor Gwyneth Paltrow is not one of the most popular celebs. She once topped a “most hated” list, there are more than five million Google hits for the phrase “hate Gwyneth Paltrow” and she has a lifestyle blog called Goop. Enough said. But this week, things got even worse.

LONDON — Poor Gwyneth Paltrow is not one of the most popular celebs. She once topped a “most hated” list, there are more than five million Google hits for the phrase “hate Gwyneth Paltrow” and she has a lifestyle blog called Goop. Enough said. But this week, things got even worse.

Paltrow told the world she was trying to live off US$29 (S$39) for a week, as part of a food challenge to raise awareness around the Food Bank for New York City. Cue photos of a shopping basket filled with limes, coriander and kale.

Obviously, Paltrow could not feed a small rabbit on this, let alone her entire family. So she took to her blog and wrote: “We only made it through about four days, when I personally broke and had some chicken and fresh vegetables (and in full transparency, half a bag of black licorice).”

In other words, Paltrow failed. The super-successful celebrity messed up — and she’s admitted it. Even with the full knowledge that the haters would relish an opportunity to bask in her failure, she broke the F-word taboo. She didn’t even try and pass it off as a decent attempt, but graded herself a ‘C-minus’ for her meagre efforts and humbly spoke about how much she’d learnt.

This is an incredibly difficult thing to do — whether you’re an A-lister or not. Societies are hardwired to look down on failure. We all strive to succeed; and when someone comes out and says they’ve not managed it — we tend to relish their fall from grace (#fail), or awkwardly look the other way. It’s why Paltrow’s admission is actually pretty admirable — in its own small way it reminds us that it’s okay to fail. That everyone — no matter who you are — will be humiliated at some point.

JK Rowling would be proud. Because the bestselling author has just published a book all about failure — primarily her own. In Very Good Lives, originally a speech she gave at Harvard University, she reminisces over “failing on an epic scale”. Her story is famous: She was a single parent, unemployed and “as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless”.

From there, she managed to become one of the most famous authors of our time. But this isn’t the bit Rowling wants to talk about — she wants to focus on the dark period, before Harry Potter came along. “Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun,” she said. “So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.

“And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

It’s a powerful message and one we all need to remember. We will all fail at some point — most of us already have. So, instead of viewing it as, well, a failure, it’s important to see it as an opportunity. Not just to learn, but to try something new — to experience life.

As Rowling said: “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.”

Some of the most successful people of our time have failed horribly — Oprah was told she wasn’t “fit for TV”. And The Beatles were rejected by several record labels before Parlophone came along. But perhaps the real lesson to learn from Rowling is to enjoy failing. Don’t just keep on going, but relish it. Because you’ve got nothing to lose and people will respect you all the more for owning it.

It may sound counterintuitive, but enjoying failure is what’s liberating. If Rowling had thought too much about her circumstances, she wouldn’t have been able to get out of bed — let alone plot a seven-part wizard fantasy. “Oh well, it can’t get any worse” isn’t just a flippant comment — it’s an invitation to try. Because this can’t just be about improvement. If half of our lives are spent on an upwards trajectory, the other half are on a downwards one. So instead of trying to escape failures, why not embrace them?

Enjoy them for the knowledge they bring, the freedom — and the fact that they’ll probably take up a fair bit of your life. You may as well try and make the most of them. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.