The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure. – Chinese Proverbs (This has also been attributed to Laurence J. Peter, but I think the Chinese may have said it first) 8)
What does that mean?
It means that failure is inevitable. It is part of the learning process. If you have never failed, you simply aren’t trying to the best of your ability. But the real question is what are you going to do about the failure? Will you learn from it, or will it keep you down? Are you content with the failure or will you get up and try again? Most of us will, most of the time, get back up and try again.
Why is failure important?
Failure? Important? Have I lost my mind? Well, it has to do with a different definition of failure than I normally use. To me, failure only occurs when you don’t get back up and try again. But in the case of this quote, failure is defined as something not working according to plan. Those kind of ‘failures’ occur all the time.
Imagine what kind of a world it would be if we never failed. This can be done in one of two ways. One is by being so incredibly wise, intelligent and gifted that everything you touch turns to gold and no problem can remained unsolved after but the briefest glance. The other is to not start basic arithmetic until Junior High, hold off on the multiplication tables until High School and limit Algebra to those brainiacs in College or University (and everything else similarly dumbed down to the point that even a head of lettuce wouldn’t fail).
While the first option sounds like a mad scientist’s best dream, the other is a dystopia of mind boggling proportions. In reality, we learn interactively. Try something, note the results, and try again (hopefully in a slightly different manner). Every failure has, as it’s silver lining, a lesson for us to learn. Without failure, learning would be a bit more difficult.
Where can I apply this in my life?
For me, chemistry was always a tough class, especially the labs. Today, I have trouble in the kitchen, which is just a Chem Lab with edible ingredients and (hopefully) edible results. Even though I know how to read the instructions, somehow I manage to mangle most of what I touch. I learn from each experience, but I now cook so rarely, that it may take another decade or two to get the hang of a scratch-built cake.
Therein lies the problem for many of us. We do something, it doesn’t turn out well, so we set it aside for a while before trying again. In that interval, we have forgotten most of what we learned from the failure (if we even took the time to get past the frustration and learn from the experience). To make progress, we have to get back to it as soon as possible and repeat the process. We may have to learn the lesson several times before it sticks, so repetition, once again, is the mother of skill.
I learned this in Martial Arts as well. Some people were showing up once a week. In the six days they had off, they managed to forget most of what they learned last week, and were learning the same handful of skills over and over again, making almost no progress. For a while I was going six days a week and was making phenomenal progress. When I had to drop down to four days a week, my progress dropped by approximately half. I just wasn’t making as many mistakes, and the time off allowed me to forget some of what I had learned from the mistakes.
The big question is part of the quote: Are you content with failure? To me, it’s only labeled a failure if you stop before you achieve success. If you keep after it, you will eventually get success. Then you can stop and not have it be a failure. Edison could have stopped before he got the incandescent light-bulb, but he kept at it (along with all his helpers).
From: Twitter, undocumented feed (my bad)
confirmed at: http://en.proverbia.net/citastema.asp?tematica=442&page=2 about 2/3 of the way down
