So I am getting ready to do a presentation on “Principles of Applied Stupidity” at a corporate conference in Beverly Hills next week (that’s right… swimming pools, movie stars). I’m very excited about it, plus as an added bonus I’m going to get out of this New England weather for a few days.
Anyway, I’ve been sitting here prepping for the presentation, and something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is what I call “failure management.”
Just to reiterate, something I’ve already said again and again is that we don’t generally teach sensible failure management. Instead, we teach failure avoidance, and treat failure like it is a consistently awful thing. Failure is a good thing, for any number of reasons, especially the fact that repeated failure is usualy part of eventual success. However, that's not the whole story.
Because we attach shame feelings with failure, this throws things out of whack. When I was in school, failure was essentially not tolerated. You could fail sixth grade, but that meant you had to go back and do it again. You couldn’t just fail and stop.
This general shame that we associate with any kind of failure is, I think, a bit out of balance. There are times when one will fail, and while we’re always always always told to go back and try again, sometimes it’s a lot more sensible to just fail once and quit. If a project you started is not panning out, sometimes it’s better to just cut your losses, accept the fact that it was a lousy idea, stop wasting finite resources, erase the board, and start over with something else.
Yes, there is a lot to be said for stick to it-iveness, but there’s also a lot to be said for knowing when to quit, and not thinking less of yourself for merely being imperfect.
©) Justin Locke
