My whole working life I’ve heard how people avoid new things because they fear failure and for most of my working life I’ve just accepted that to be true.
There are obvious exceptions of course; scientists know failure can be a breakthrough in disguise; as Pasteur put it: ‘A discovery is an accident meeting a prepared mind’. Einstein had the same attitude, saying “Failure is success in progress” and Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman confessed “In order to succeed, I try to fail as quickly as I can.”
Entrepreneurs and innovators don’t seem spooked by failure either; when Richard Branson said “Don’t be embarrassed by your failures. Learn from them and start again” it reminded me of Henry Ford’s “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again” or Soichiro Honda’s “Success represents 1% of your work which results from 99% called failure.”
My favourite is still Edison’s:
“I haven’t failed. I’ve found 10,000 things that don’t work.”
Ask any great artist or athlete or leader: they’ll tell you the same thing. Failure is not only an option, it’s the key to learning. Watch any baby taking its first steps – so long as the parents are still cheering the kid will just keep getting up and trying again.
Nothing worth doing ever worked the first time. Most great things don’t work the first few dozen times; as Churchill put it: “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
Maybe it’s not failure we fear but the blame and ridicule that usually come with it.
Perhaps that’s something we might all try to do without.
dave isles
maybe the problem is with the word failure, Jason.
to me, absence of success is not failure.
failure is not doing ‘enough’ ‘work’ to achieve the desired result.
so the student who does little study gets an F, and the athlete who slacks off at training finishes in the back half, almost always.
I have checked with my oracle, and she, like me cant think of a word that conveys ‘had a red hot go, but didnt get the points’.. failure fails to convey that point!!! and any word that does, would come across as praise rather than riducule.. and encourage us to have another crack at it.
Can yourself or readers think of the right word.. or if none in our beloved English, perhaps one from another language/culture?
It would be particularly helpful in my profession where absence of real success is the norm.
cheers, Dave I
Jason
Hey Dave, A paper from Harvard Business School breaks failure into three types – routine, systemic and novel. A pilot neglects to lower the landing gear during landing – that’s a failure of ROUTINE, an unacceptable critical mistake in a universally-agreed procedure. A SYSTEMIC failure is when an institution fails to identify and resolve its most serious issues (Facebook, Volkswagon, News Corp, the Vatican) and are arguably the worst failures of all. A NOVEL failure is when something that has never been tried before doesn’t work out as predicted; what scientists and innovators would call DISCOVERY… which isn’t actually a failure at all. I’ve been thinking of doing a piece about this… what do you think? Best regards to The Oracle. JC
dave isles
Isolating novel failure from the other two, would be a great start, Jason.
and expanding on the theme of ‘having a crack’, would be very handy.
My mentor’s mentor gave our student stream the wisdom of ‘if you dont know what to do, do SOMETHING’.
I often struggled with the uncertainties or potentially high ‘cost’ of the ‘somethings’ that i had in mind, but taking the advice and having a crack, always resulted in more satisfaction than being paralysed by indecision.. many calls would rate as novel failures, and some were real clangers, but there have been enough ‘wins’ along the way to keep me ‘having a crack’..
The Oracle and I look forward to your take on novel failure.. a new phrase, or even better, a single word might help us all overcome the dreaded ‘fear of failure’.. cheers, Dave I