The Value of Failure

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By. Jamie F. – An expert failure artist

When I was a kid, I used to cry every single time my family and I went bowling. I was (and still am) a terrible bowler, and so I always lost, and so I always cried. In a terrible effort to comfort me, my dad would pinch me on the arm and ask if I was still upset about losing. I would cry louder because now not only was I a FAILURE but my ARM hurt TOO.

Why is that? Why do we stigmatize the act of failure; relegating those who fail to the underworld of “losers?” Now that I’m older I’ve failed at lots of stuff in addition to bowling, most of it over and over again! So am I a loser? Nope! I’m a person, like normal people - because everybody fails! In fact, being a failure is required in order to become a well-rounded, contributing member of society. There’s really no meaningful difference between “winners” and “losers.”

But we HATE losing! As a society, we simply cannot stand the idea. And here’s the thing: when failure is stigmatized – demonized – people will try to avoid it at all costs, even when it represents nothing more than a temporary setback. What seems the safer path of no setbacks and no failure is deceptively dangerous. If we never take a risk, then we never reap any rewards. No progress, forward or back, can be achieved.

Getting anything of worth done requires risk. And risk requires failure. Repeated, on-purpose failure. That’s just how risks work – they’re risky. But luckily, how math works is that if you increase the number of attempts, the probability rises dramatically that one of your risks pays off. An example of risk can be forcing yourself to draw for a while only in pen without sketching first, no matter how much it scares you.

I recently came across an intriguing TED talk by author Elizabeth Gilbert. Her book ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ was a huge success but caused her to fear never being able to reach that mark again in her future work. She nearly let the fear of failure affect her passion for writing. Watch the video below to see how failure instead helped fuel her passion further.