Fast Company: There are two sides to every story: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times; you take the bitter with the sweet; every rose has its thorn. However, in leadership, we often miss out on half the story. Most discussions focus on what leaders "should do" rather than on what they "should avoid." The result? We talk about success, but seldom talk about failure.
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There is a HUGE paradox in success versus failure-- I know this article says that failure is important for growth, as I believe also, but we are always engrained to believe that failure just isn't an option. I'd like to think of this in different terms- maybe a better way to word this would be: "perfection" may not be mandatory, but pure effort is. I feel that as long as you put the effort, work, and dedication in, you cannot fail. Failure only happens when you half-heartedly pull something together, without thinking it through, and make rash decision because of any number of scenarios. Otherwise, I think that failure is simply not being true to yourself, true to your team, and dishonest and unthoughtful when carrying out a plan of action. You cannot lose if you don't stop trying, you only lose when you don't want to try.
Failure is defiantly a big part of success. The most important element in there is learning from mistakes. It reminds me of Edison's famous quote about how he didn't fail the first 1000 times he tried to make a lightbulb work, he learned 1000 ways not to make a lightbulb. I think its also to realize that you not only learn from your own mistakes, but from others. Being the youngest of 6 children, i pretty much learned something every time they made a mistake or failed at something.
I think as a manager there is value in discussing things that everyone knows are not possible because at least you went down that road and everyone feels like their ideas were listened to and valued. Obviously you should not do this all the time but if people feel like they are being supported enough then they will produce better work. Failure can happen even when you are trying really hard, but mistakes slip through, it is how you deal with them that makes you a good or bad manager.
The truth is every great leader makes mistakes. Unfortunately, there are only a limited number of mistakes you can make before proving yourself an unworthy leader--you can only fall off the corporate ladder so many times before your climb is finished. And the higher you get, the more severe the fall. The failure paradox is that in order to succeed we need to know failure.
And here is the irony. There are critically important lessons to be learned from failures.
I'm a big fan of this as it sums up the the world we live in pretty well, as unfortunate as that is. We really do live in a more timid, restrained world that doesn't take as many chances because of this constant fear of failure and the repercussions of failure. Failure is something everyone should be better at accepting and learning from because that is how our society grows.
If you want an industry that I think failure needs to be a large part of to succeed, then welcome to my world of art and entertainment. If you think about how much you are told you succeeded and how much you are told you failed over the first two years at CMU, they kind of equal out. If you dont have anything to fail at, there is no room to improve. Failing allows you to learn and later not do the same thing over again, or make improvements, in turn making that failure a success.
This summer I got into a philosophical argument about the fact that you can never be wrong. Because in that moment that you are wrong, you were right about being wrong. And you apparently always do more right then wrong everyday. But does that mean thats because you were always right, cause youre never wrong according to what I discussed this summer. So in turn you always succeed because your failures are a success if you learn from them?
I definitely believe that in order to succeed at anything in life you need to know not only how to succeed but how to fail, and how to learn from your failures. When humans first start to learn we learn from what we do wrong its our basis of knowledge. How ever that is not to say that we should fail all the time just that when we do we learn from it.
Failure is necessary.
We cannot succeed without understanding what it means to fall short.
Failure provides stakes. Without their being something to lose, how can there be any gain?
I especially feel that it is vital from a management perspective to understand what failure, so we can not only learn and plan from those failures, but also know what do when such instances arise.
How can we really be effective leaders, if we don't know how to lead in times of crises or come back from it?
It is true that you can learn more from a failure than you can at a success but this article infers that failure is essential to success and therefore desired. This article and most of the comments site examples were a person turned a failure into a live lesson that eventually turned into a great success. Like Mr. Edison and the light bulb. There are however, tons of failures that were just failures. Like Mr. Tucker and his Dream. The goal is clearly success. Failure may sometimes be in the path to success but it should not be sought after, just learned from.
You hear this all the time from articles like this one, from so many professors here, from almost all of these comments. Failure is necessary, failure is the only way you can learn, enduring mistakes is the only way to truly improve. While this is said over and over, very few people actually act like this is the case. Actions speak louder than words. You can say these sentiments anyway you want, but unless you back them up when the time comes, it doesn't mean anything at all. In reality, a lot of times mistakes and failures mean you fail a project. Or you get fired. Or you don't get trusted with responsibility again. It's really hard to improve your status once you've made a mistake. Others may not even know the circumstances around what happened, they may just know it didn't work, and that is enough to hold against you. While it's great to try to advocate that mistakes aren't too terrible, in reality a lot of times that just isn't the case.
Success cannot be achieved without knowing what failure would be. Failure is only considered such when there is a desired success that is not achieved. Therefore, it is impossible to develop these expectations without experiencing both failure and success, the upper and lower limits of our abilities. Both success and failure have their place in our life learning. Sometimes we can learn the most from our failures, which can then lead us to succeed. I feel that failure is not necessarily a bad thing.
I like how this article recites Edison's quotation about mistake which is one of my favorite quotation. I understand that a failure is not an "option" but a necessary portion of our life in order to succeed. However, in a society in which requires perfection, a lot of mistakes are not allowed. But still, I think a mistake is definitely good thing before coming up with successful idea. For me as a designer, I consider mistakes is a one further step to success because I learn from them and also from others'. I hope this society becomes more lenient to people who make mistakes and encourage them to further develop.
I think that this artical hits the nail on the head when it comes to how scoity feels about failure. Larry Weinzimmer and Jim McConoughey mostly talk about the idea that failer is important and nesisary in the context of bussnes and politics, but I think that it also holds an important role in the world of education.
I know that when I was in high school there were many kids who were far more focused on getting in the the right college or AP calss then they were on learning and as such they were so scared to make mistakes on class work that they would regularly cheat on homework assignmetns. This sort of behaver is compleatly counteractive that the point of eduation.
Another example is here at CMU. If a student gets a few to many low grades in a semester he/she will be asked to take a leave from the school. This might cuase students to be more stressed about avoiding mistakes then they should be.
On the onther hand I understand whta the artical says about there being a limit to the number of mistakes we can allow someone to make before we declair them unfit for what ever it is they are attempting to do.
As students and young adults, we don't want to hear anything about being a failure at anything. Especially at Carnegie Mellon where being "practically perfect in every way" is what we strive to be. Of course I know that nobody really is perfect, but in today's society, it is a goal that most of us have. It was refreshing, and even a de-stressor to read this article that pretty much states that until we fail, we don't truly find how successful we can be. We have always heard that we learn from our mistakes. I have definitely learned form mine, but i still dread the fact that I will continue to learn more as that means i didn't do my best. Knowing that failures make us better in the long run, is a positive and healthy way to live. I can accept the fact that I may fail, but not at the expense of losing my dream. I will be open to correcting my mistakes in hopes that I will be allowed to do better, and I will be thankful for those who see me fail, but are willing to help me succeed again.
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