Failing

We don’t generally celebrate failure; we don’t salute its arrival, at least not in a military way. Neither do we cheer when somebody we like or respect messes up. We don’t slap them on the back and say, “Hey man that was a spectacular screw up!” And people don’t wake up in the morning looking forward to failing at something during the day. Overall it’s probably safe to say that for most people, failing at something is a negative experience.

Now many of you have probably had someone tell you that failure is a part of life and that we should learn from our mistakes and move on, and that it is okay to fail. I have certainly heard it … heck, I’ve even said it. But it always sounds to me just a little, well … forced. Saying it is okay to fail doesn’t flow off the tongue like an enthusiastic “atta boy”. I mean do we really believe in our hearts that it’s okay to fail … if it is; it certainly never feels okay to me. Mostly it makes me feel crappy. So the walk here doesn’t live up to the talk … and there’s a reason for that, me thinks.

Somewhere, on the trip from womb to grave, we learned that failing should feel bad, not just be bad, and that success should feel downright euphoric. Given the apparent strength of these feelings, I suspect the notion that failure = bad and success = good was reinforced sufficiently in every aspect of our lives, young and old, to become a truism. So for most of us, no amount of cheery talk and theorizing around the appropriateness and acceptability of failure is going to have us wrestling for the bragging rights.

Of course the paradox of failure isn't anything new, we have known forever the value of experience, of trial and error and the its power to teach us everything from tying our shoes to finding cures for diseases. But we are conditioned as humans to seek approval and to belong and that seems to come more readily to those who have “succeeded” than it does to those who have failed. So we have stigmatized failure and those who have failed, seeing “failure” as something definitely less desirable than success. Admittedly the consequences of failure can be high, even fatal and irreversible so it is easy to see why failure and its authors have gotten such a bad rap. But as unpleasant as failure is ascribed to be, it’s an essential ingredient of the human condition and it’s only through failing, that we can be properly positioned to learn, grow, and develop as individuals and as a collective.

So we need to fail, and we need to allow ourselves and others to fail and embrace those failures as opportunities to learn. Now I’m not suggesting that we start letting people fly or drive without licenses, clearly people need to be competent before independently doing a host of activities. But true competency is gained through effort and by implication, serial failure. What I am suggesting is that the stigma associated with failure needs to be shelved along with the emotional negativity that makes failing a bad thing, instead of an important step towards improvement.

When we fear failure we limit ourselves, we become timid and unsure of new experiences. But embracing the inevitability of failure, like we did when we were learning to tie our shoes, will lead us to doing things better. The way I see it, always being successful means you've never really tested yourself.