Failure: It's Not Only An Option, It's a Gift!

This holiday season, as you reflect on gifts, blessings and traditions, I hope you’ll join me in saying a word of thanks for failure. 
 
Just about every major task I do well—or now have an obsession with—stems from a practical lesson learned from my own stunningly horrific error.
 
For instance, in Spellcheck’s eyes, “pubic” and “public” are completely interchangeable words to use in your statewide press release about childhood literacy. Major takeaways: I have now removed “pubic” from my Spellcheck dictionary and never send out a public document without having a peer review it.   
 
What about you? I’m willing to bet that many of your memorable life-lessons are those you learned the hard way. Whether it involved starting a small business, sports competitions, your first marriage, email etiquette or child rearing, haven’t we all experienced complete failure? Public mistakes and embarrassing moments make for unforgettable, priceless clarity. 
 
But if failure is frequently beneficial, why do we fear it? Why are we motivated by “inspirational” phrases like Robert Schuller’s “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” And don’t forget about the (too) often quoted, “Failure is not an option.” 
 
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll authored one of my favorite NPR This I Believe submissions from 2006. “Failure is how we learn,” says Carroll. “I have been told of an African phrase describing a good cook as ‘she who has broken many pots.’ If you’ve spent enough time in the kitchen to have broken a lot of pots, probably you know a fair amount about cooking. I once had a late dinner with a group of chefs, and they spent time comparing knife wounds and burn scars. They knew how much credibility their failures gave them.” 
 
Failure fosters credibility! I love that perspective.  
 
I certainly don’t mean to trivialize the fear of failure. It is real—often heartbreaking and humiliating—and, for many people, paralyzing. Indeed, the primary reason you folks tell me you are avoiding the social media scene is because you’re scared you’ll do it wrong. You fear you will break the Internet, or say something patently offensive and appear ignorant. You can’t and you won’t.
 
But if you don’t play around on the Internet—become a social media guinea pig, as I like to say—you’ll never really learn what to do and not to do. It’s all about trial and error. And the more you try something, the more likely it is you’ll mess up now and then. And that’s okay.  
 
Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success is a fabulous read. In it, Gladwell talks about what made some of the most famous men and women of our time so successful. One theory: they practiced—thereby, making and correcting countless mistakes—more than anyone else. 
 
Gladwell cites researchers who claim it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a discipline. Imagine how many mistakes one can make in 10,000 hours! And for nearly every misstep, a lesson learned! 
 
Another thing about failure: it’s much more powerful when it’s your own. Think about that guy you dated (and/or married) that you shouldn’t have. Your friends told you a thousand times that dude was no good, but you wouldn’t hear it. And now, you could write the What Not to Date handbook. But you had to realize—and own—that failure for yourself. 
 
Give thanks for the failures that take your breath away, the life-lessons that cause you to refine your thinking and recalculate your game plan. You’ll recover—you always do. And you’ll likely be all the wiser for it.
 
So, if at first you don’t succeed—rejoice! As the Irish clergyman William Connor Magee once said,  “the man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.”