It can be troubling to watch people unwittingly sabotage their own success with a desire to protect themselves (and those they care about) from the pains of failure. I’ve lost count of the birthday parties I have attended where every child in the “pass the parcel” game gets a prize because Mum has placed one in every layer of wrapping. Sadly, many workplaces are little better, with staff expecting and receiving praise for actions that don’t rise to the level of praiseworthy. Every person and every project seem to be a success simply by virtue of their existence. The reality is that true success cannot be achieved without a willingness to embrace failure.
The field of human endeavour is awash with examples of complementary processes—that is, two seemingly opposing actions that actually work together. Success and failure work this way. While “failure” is a dirty word in many places, the truth is you can never succeed beyond the limits of what you have already achieved if you are not prepared to risk failure. Thomas Edison tried literally thousands of different filaments before patenting a viable light bulb.
“You must learn to fail intelligently…one fails forwards towards success.”
—Charles F. Kettering
If, like Edison, your aim is to succeed in ways you have not succeeded before, you need to be comfortable with the failures you will inevitably experience along the way. This is how you will learn your way towards the success you are striving to achieve.
“You will learn more from a brilliantly executed failure than from a success executed within the dreary safety of what you already know.”
—Bryce Courtney
You may have heard that effective leaders are risk takers and now you know why. This does not mean you should be reckless in your decisions as a leader. You need to show enough nous to know when a risk is worth taking and when it is best to play it safe. The answer lies in whether the benefits of learning and the prospects of long-term success outweigh the costs of short-term failure.
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