on failure

I never sailed through school with straight A’s. But I did get half decent grades. The truth is, those half decent grades were never the result of effortless brilliance but rather the fruit of inconsistent spurts of discipline and an intense fear of “failure”.

Failure meant different things at different times to me. In undergraduate calculus, it really did mean failure, i.e. getting an F, which I was pretty darn close to doing. At other times, it meant getting anything below an A-, receiving only mild applause after a speech or having someone leave a dinner party I threw early.

Last week I came across a lot of helpful ideas about failure that I would like to share.

First, J.K. Rowling's speech to Harvard’s class of 2008 had two themes: the importance of failure and of imagination (scroll down the link above to read the speech in full):

“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.”

Next, “The antidote for the fear of failure is not success but small doses of failure. Once you fail and realize it’s not the end of the world, you’re not as afraid to fail again.” (Craig Groeschel, It)

And to further J.K. Rowling’s point: Craig Groeschel shouts:

“[If you are not regularly failing]…maybe you need to try something new—and fail at it. I tell our staff often, 'Fail! If you’re not failing, you’ve stopped dreaming. You’ll eventually stop learning. And you will stop growing.'

So there. Let that be an encouragement to us all at some point or another.

A final thought:

“Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” ~Winston Churchill