Most of us treat failure as something to be avoided. We do all we can to succeed in whatever we have started, and to avoid getting involved in any projects that might expose us to failure.
One of my bedside books at the moment is The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence by Tom Peters. He presents a Theory of Failure in chapter 19 which is a real challenge to people of a more cautious nature like myself.
Here is my summary: To succeed in any area, you have to try a lot of stuff – quickly. If you try lots of stuff in a hurry, you will make lots of mistakes – always. Hence, making mistakes often is a very good sign of progress; perhaps the only sure sign. So moving forward is not about just tolerating mistakes, it’s about being open to them, learning from them, maximising them, celebrating them, even encouraging them.
He quotes Phil Daniels:
Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.
And at the end of the chapter he has his own list of favourite ‘failure’ quotations:
- “Fail. Forward. Fast.” (High-tech exec)
- “Fail faster. Succeed sooner.” (David Kelly, founder IDEO)
- “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” (Samuel Beckett)
- “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” (Winston Churchill)
- “Whoever makes the most mistakes wins.” (Book by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes)
- “If people…tell me they skied all day and never fell down, I tell them to try a different mountain.” (Michael Bloomberg)
- “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” (Michael Jordan)
Maybe this is all a bit too ‘Management-Guru-Self-Help-Book’ for you – but I found it very thought-provoking!
Hello Fr Stephen. This post is, agaim, very thought provoking and Peters’ quotations of Daniels are good. I’ve never really been keen on this type of book. My attitude has always been best summed up as ‘work as quickly as you are safely able, learn from mistakes and celebrate successes’. This works for me, but I guess we have to find our own way of working.
I’m currently reading The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Another sort of marketing exec self-help-guru book. It’s all about social treads, or epidemics as he calls them. Apprently there are 3 sorts of people: connectors, salesmen, and mavens. Context is isa important.
It’s my on the train, on the bus, before bed reading.
Thank you for sharing yours.
“By seeing the seed of failure in every sucsess we remain humble. By seeing the seed of sucsess in every failure we remain hopeful”
I failed to spell success successfully :O/
I liked this post being often a failure myself!
I’ve always found the ‘Management-Guru-self-help’ type books fascinating! I had one years ago, now out of print, and lost(!) – but it gave a lot of sound advice which served me well – mostly about staying positive, and planning.
Over the years I’ve built up a fair collection of them including some of the 7 Habits series; the famous ‘How to win friends and influence people’ by Dale Carnegie, “Organise Yourself” which is misplaced (!) so I can’t find the author – and an interesting little one called “Get everything done and still have time to play” by Mark Forster. …And many more!
While they haven’t all had as much permanent effect as I would like – evidently – some of the recurring themes have made me think they have adapted a lot of their wise advice from Catholic practice!!
e.g.
-affirmations “I am successful blah blah blah…”
seem to derive, at least a little, from morning prayers –
which in many cases help strengthen our faith by
keeping God in the picture from minute one;
-plan/break up your day/walk away from your screen every hour etc….
seem to employ a concept similar to the Divine Office
(or the Angelus if you’re me!) – in having scheduled
‘away time’ to help focus
and so on.
The treatment of failure, as you’ve written, is very sound. But, in my experience, if you fail spectacularly in anything – in a way which brings some kind of ‘end’ that can’t be undone – only the spiritual answers get you anywhere!
Which is why – if I may gripe for a sec. – I’m not comfortable when at Mass I hear the Penitential Rites announced in words like ‘Let us bring all our little failures to God…’ etc. While I completely agree with your words about being open to failures (I give this lecture all the time having turned my poor children into terrified perfectionists – well some of them anyway), sin isn’t something to ‘maximise and celebrate’ is it!?
Yes, there is a big difference between sin (which is consciously choosing something that is bad), and the kind of failure talked about here (which comes from consciously choosing something good that may involve risks and uncertainties). Thanks for the nice connections between good management practices and the Catholic devotional tradition. I’ve got a book on my shelf, still unread, called Jesus, CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership, by Laurie Beth Jones. You can look it up!