Learning from Failure

"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all." ~Friedrich Nietzsche

As a culture, failure isn't usually something we embrace. All the great motivational books and speakers tell us to be tenacious, to keep moving, to strive for success in all we do. We are told that we are a success when we finally have that "perfected end result" to celebrate. Our culture is pervasive with motivational aphorisms that deal with success - such as: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going", and "A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins".

These expressions really miss the mark. I think that we are not a true success, until we take the time to embrace our failings. I know for my own part, when things are going along smoothly, I don't necessarily pay a great deal of attention. But should something I am working on fail, then you have my full attention.

In my off hours, I enjoy quilting. Now let me be plain about this, I came by this hobby in a round about way. I have never taken a sewing lesson and had never even touched a sewing machine until 8 years ago when my husband gave me one for Christmas. As a result, I make a lot of mistakes...a LOT of mistakes. Every mistake teaches me something, however. A broken needle might have me playing with machine tension and I'll learn something new about my machine. Cutting my fabric incorrectly may force me to piece it in a different way, and I will come up with a new block design as a result.

When things are going as planned, rarely do we give much thought to them; we tend to simply sail right along. I think Arthur Ashe was correct when he said: "Success is a journey, not a destination.The doing is often more important than the outcome."

Gever Tulley is a software engineer and one of the founders of Tinkering School (http://www.tinkeringschool.com/) a week long camp "where lucky kids get to play with their very own power tools. He's interested in helping kids learn how to build, solve problems, use new materials and hack old ones for new purposes." (TED Conferences LLC). When discussing his approach to teaching at this camp, he states that "Success is in the doing, and failures are celebrated an analyzed." I like that notion. Celebrating failure is a foreign idea in our culture, and through analyzing our failure, we truly learn and discover. In American and most Western cultures, seldom do we take the time to not only look at our failures, but to look forward to them. As Winston Churchill once said: "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

You can see Gever Tulley discuss Tinkering School here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action.html