Picturing failure

Our educational system rewards success and penalizes failure.  To most people, that seems right. We want to create successful citizens able to make well-informed choices, vote, hold jobs, raise families, and make the world a better place.  Yes, we do. We want all of that. That's part of why we provide access to education.

But while we have the best of intentions, we forget that the path from here (wherever that happens to be) to success is paved with failure. Individual failure, collective failure, smart failure, fast failure, failure that teaches us what we need to know and propels us further along the path.   Failure is the part of the scientific method that we tend to forget, as testing a hypothesis requires that we be as open to the possibility of failure as to possibility of success when determining what the data actually tell us.

The mantra to fail fast, fail smart, fail cheap is intended to remind us that failing become less likely to hurt us when we embrace it on a daily basis.  The large and/or tragic failures are sometimes quirks of fate; other times, however, they reflect a refusal to fail earlier, when the stakes would have been lower.

Picture yourself failing, learning from the failure, and making better choices as a result. It's amazing how freeing that can be, whether from self-denigration or the equally destructive criticism of the failures of others.

"Self-expression over excellence, confidence over perfection."

I read and copied it (by hand) without attribution many years ago.  There's a sadness in my inability to attribute authorship to words powerful enough to write about some 15 or so years later.  A significant learning in the intervening years is the wisdom of always noting the source, whether a book, a lecture, a website, a speech, or a private conversation. If it's important enough to remember, it's important enough to remember the source.  Though I've tried, I've not yet been able to find the source (and, yes, help is welcome).

What I do remember is why I kept this quote for (re)discovery.  It captured much of what I wanted to convey to my now-grown daughter about the difference between striving for perfection (by some external standard) and accepting who we are. Striving to achieve the unrealistic goal of Perfect derails the very efforts that lead to excellence, as well as the efforts that lead to failure--the failure required for learning.

This doesn't excuse mediocre work or cutting corners or accepting less than our best effort.  What it does, however, is free us from the debilitating effects of chasing a perfection we will never reach.  It frees us from the tyranny of perfection, the tyranny that most often blossoms as procrastination.

Knowing we cannot reach perfection, we fail to reach at all.  Far better to start with an honest assessment and acceptance of who we are and what we know, then find the people and the opportunities to challenge us to personal excellence.

"You...completed the privilege of playing"

In the midst of wrapping up one semester and planning for another (as the teacher) and starting a semester (as the student), an article about Coach Frosty Westering made me stop and write.

Though Westering left coaching in 2003 and "slipped the surly bonds of Earth" last Friday, his legacy is one of honoring the losses and well as the wins, making time to savor what matters in life, and singing.  Yes, singing:

During warmups for the NCAA Division III national championship in December 1999, right there on the field in Virginia, his players sang "The Twelve Days of Christmas," then proceeded to win 42-13.

Can you imagine warming up on the other side, then losing 42-13 to that?

Coach Westering instilled in his players the relative importance in life of losing.  Losing means you had the privilege of playing, a privilege that "could not occur without opponents." 

It might be easy to dismiss all of this as the Pollyanna attitude of an average coach, if not for the fact that Westering holds a record for most coaching wins and ranks ninth in wins among all college football coaches.

 Win or lose; succeed or fail.  One defines the other and how we handle both defines us.

Expert risk takers

Decisions not to pursue a course of action unless we are reasonably certain of success. Taking the safe path.  Calculating the odds.  Weighing the alternatives and choosing with care.  One really can't argue with any of these.  On the other hand, there would be no air travel, vaccines, tall buildings, or world records if everyone calculated, weighed, and chose safely.

Why is there not room for both in my workplace, my class, my family...and my life?  And what is the role of education?  What about the role of learning?

I recently watched Erin McKean talk about lexicography (that seems a safe enough topic) and was struck by her assertion that "paper is the enemy of words"...that the book-shaped repository for words is self-limiting.  What makes these statements powerful is that Erin McKean is a lexicographer who loves books and words with a passion I admire. Able to embrace both the historical paper dictionary and the limitless online dictionary, McKean provides both reassurance and challenge:

There will still be paper dictionaries.  When cars became the dominant mode of transportation, we didn't round up all the horses and shoot them.

Exploring alternatives does not necessarily eliminate the historical voice.  What if embracing both the limits and the limitless allows more people into the conversation?  If encouraging risk is important, perhaps the challenge is being open to the who, what, when, why, and how questions that all curious and creative people ask.  They just ask them differently...or refuse the accept the old answers.

I am not advocating foolish or ill-advised risk in the classroom or in life.  Rather, I am wondering why we ceased to provide the solid foundation of knowledge that allows room for experimentation, risk (failure?), discovery, and innovation. It's the experts who seem to make the best risk-takers.

Failing to learn

Failure is a recurring theme in much of my reading, of late.  Oddly enough, the reading I've been doing is about creativity and innovation.  About our education system.  And about the connection between learning and failing.

Though it may more accurately be the fear of failure, rather than failure itself, that is the antithesis of creativity, the technicality seems less important than the recognition that much effort is expended in the avoidance of failure.  This is odd to me, as the most important lessons are generally those that involve failure.

Failing to learn.  By refusing to fail?  Or by understanding the importance of failure?

One of the gifts of age is having enough failures to harvest.