“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
-Winston Churchill
Failure is the best teacher.
It’s something I’ve told my students over and over during my years as a teacher and a coach. You never learn half as much from success as you do from failure.
Success has this way of appearing and disappearing so quickly that the time used to achieve that success is often felt to have “flown by”. You might remember all the individual events that led to it, but that final act of success discourages deep reflection and interaction with that time. It affirms the talents and skills and processes from which it bloomed, but does not require much more internalization, because, in the end, it was a success. It’s not always easy to tell if it happened because you did something right, or in spite of the things you did wrong.
I suspect that is because life is complicated, and there is a healthy dose of right and wrong involved in every outcome. The point is that success confirms whichever process you followed to get there, not necessarily the best.
Failure, on the other hand, is slow and difficult and painful. It makes time feels as though it drags on and on. You intimately recall and analyze every decision, right or wrong, and how that decision interacted with your environment to result in failure. You mull over, you reflect, you regret or even make excuses for each step of whichever process you followed to get to that final result, because failure is something that you want to avoid. Then…you make adjustments.
You tinker. You experiment to see if a change to your behavior, or your skill set, or your environment might make the difference between success and failure. Failure teaches you how to analyze and experiment. Failure teaches you to try something new.
This is all a bit dramatic; of course there are levels of success and failure. Getting caught in a debt cycle when I was younger was clearly a larger personal failure than my inability to get a bit of code in Python or a recorded song to behave like I expect. The degree to which those events affected my life were very obviously different. The way those experiences taught me to reevaluate, make changes, and try again, but better…that process is pretty similar.
So here I am – a failure. I have failed at many and more of the things I have tried to accomplish in my life. I will certainly fail at many more before I am through. Each failure has taken something from me, but it has also taught me a little something about the why and how of striving and seeking and learning. It has taught me that the world doesn’t owe me success. The most memorable successes must be put through the rigorous and unsympathetic test of failure.
The choice to keep trying, though failure is always an option, is the choice to live boldly and with purpose.
So as I once again step into the wilderness, I’ll carry my failures with me – next to my map and my compass.
-themikemcadams