Well, it’s more or less the middle of winter and here in Boston I’m under 2 feet of snow and not much else is going on, so I thought I would blog about one of my books, i.e., "Principles of Applied Stupidity."
I am going to be giving a few talks on this book in the near future, and as is typical, I find myself sitting here sort of "rehearsing" my presentation, and I figured, why not do a blog at the same time?
So the topic for today is . . . . failure.
Failure is one of those nasty words that get associated with "stupidity." If you fail a test or a subject in school, this is of course cause for great alarm… it’s a terrible thing to have a kid who has gotten an "F" . . . Just the mere mention of it makes my skin crawl.
But here’s the thing: I submit to you that failure is a good thing. This is because failure is an inevitable byproduct of pushing yourself to your furthest limits and taking on a truly challenging goal. If you are not failing occasionally, you aren’t pushing yourself very hard.
By teaching kids throughout their institutionalized educational experience that failure is a shameful thing to be avoided at all costs, we are inadvertently teaching them not to try anything really difficult, because trying something really difficult creates a very high likelihood of at least momentary failure.
Instead of teaching failure avoidance, what we should be teaching is failure recovery. Instead of panicking about it, and trying to make sure it never happens, we should accept it and teach ways of dealing with it. Of course, since there is so much emotionalism about how "smart" or "dumb" one is, there is little chance of this being dealt with in a calm rational productive way.
I often feel like my entire school experience failed me because I never had an opportunity to practice working with or through failure. There was so much well-intended failure avoidance built into the system that everything was made easy for me, and so I never had any experience with failure until I was well away from school. And what a shock it was to my system. If it wasn’t for extreme economic necessity I am sure I would have crawled into a hole somewhere of no-risk-of-failure, and I would have no doubt taken on a life of total obscurity. No one would have heard from me again. Perhaps that was the real goal of the whole process.
I confess, I’m starting to understand that instilling shame in the general population is a key factor in maintaining order and control. Well, in my case, it failed. 🙂
It took me quite a while, but I have pretty much overcome my fear of, and shame associations with, failure. Given how far I push myself into new areas all the time, I actually have an extremely high failure rate. But I have learned that failure is momentary, no one remembers it, and since I am not afraid of failing any more, at the end of the fiscal year, in net terms of achievement, I have generally done a whole a lot more than those who have merely avoided failure all year.
I will admit, failure is not fun and I do not enjoy it. But I’m not afraid of it either… for anyone in a truly creative or leadership position, it’s just a cost of doing business.
This is just one of many such topics in my book, "Principles of Applied Stupidity."
© Justin Locke
