In Praise of Failure
A number of years ago at a small community college in North Carolina, a college president urged his faculty to be willing to risk failure. He believed that only by experimenting with new teaching strategies could his faculty meet the demands of a new population of students and a new era. He realized that experimentation increased the odds of failure.
What he may not have fully realized is the level of risk he was asking of his faculty. The teaching persona is built around being an “expert” and within the confines of the classroom, being competent and in control. Failure, or the risk of failure, does not coexist comfortably with the traditional role of being a teacher.
In his chapter “Hailing Failing and Still Sailing” from
Information Anxiety, author Richard Saul Wurman addresses this issue in a thoughtful way. Below are several quotes borrowed from this section of his book.
"You learn balance by losing it"
So you think that you're a failure do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure. Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
"Jonas Salk spent 98 percent of his time documenting the things that didn't work until he found the thing that did."
"Every exit is an entry somewhere else"
--Tom Stoppard
"How often I saw where I should be going by setting out for somewhere else."
--R. Buckminster Fuller
"My definition of failure is delayed success."