How we succeed by failing
By Kathleen Parker, Published: October 14
By the time Steve Jobs’s Wikipedia page had been adjusted to
past tense, eulogists had added a footnote to his biography of success.
Failure.
Jobs, though wildly successful, also failed often and badly.
Therein, we note, lies perhaps the larger lesson of his life: Sometimes you
have to fail to succeed.
The truth is, you usually have to fail to succeed. No one
emerges at the top. Even those born lucky eventually get a turn on the wheel of
misfortune. Anyone with a résumé of accomplishments also has a résumé of
failures, humiliations and setbacks. Jobs was fired by the company he
co-founded. Yet it was during this period of exile that he picked up a little
computer graphics company later called Pixar Animation Studios, the sale of
which made him a billionaire.
This is to say, to fail is human. To resurrect oneself is an
act of courage.
Jobs himself recognized his failures in a now-famous 2005
commencement speech at Stanford. He recalled sleeping on the floors of friends’
dorm rooms and walking seven miles to a Hare Krishna temple for his one good
meal of the week. One needn’t make an appointment with the Genius Bar to glean
the moral of this story.
Fear of failure isn’t only an adult concern. From an early
age, we are plagued with anxiety about performance. This seems a natural-enough
evolutionary development. The strong and savvy survive (and get the girl). The
less accomplished eat scraps and enjoy the company of human leftovers.
“Losers,” we call them. So habitual is our attention to failure that we even
have a word — or at least the Germans do — for enjoying others’: schadenfreude.
What possibly could make us take pleasure in another’s
failure? Simple. We love the company.
A history of human failure would make for a long and
interesting read, yet we prefer books about success. We thrill at the end-zone
victory dance, applaud the extra point, admire the perfect 10. In literature,
what is redemption but recovery from human failing? We love no one more than
the man or woman who says I made a mistake, I’m sorry, please forgive me.
Forgive? We want to hoist the penitent on our shoulders.
An entire lexicon of cliches has evolved around the idea of
failure and recovery. It’s not the thing attained that matters; it’s the
journey that gives us life. The act of creation — the struggle — far exceeds
the pleasure of the thing created. Unless, of course, it’s an Apple iPhone 4S.
BlackBerry? Not so much.
Recent acknowledgment of the power of failure, inspired by
Jobs’s too-soon demise, provides a welcome spiritual uplift for stressed-out
adults. But we’re missing an even more important morality tale that has
profound consequences for our nation’s future. Our obsession with success and
our fear of failure has trickled down to ever-younger humans, our children, at
great cost not only to their psychological well-being but also, ultimately, to
our ability to compete in the global marketplace.
We’re so afraid that our kids won’t measure up that we drive
them crazy with overbooked schedules and expectations and then create a sense
of entitlement by insisting on assigning blame elsewhere when their performance
is lackluster. Sideline parents, first cousins to back-seat drivers, who
challenge coaches, teachers and umpires on behalf of their children are a
relatively new development that can’t be considered positive. When I wrote
recently about the failure (there’s that word again) of colleges to teach core
curricula that engender critical thinking skills, dozens of professors wrote to
complain of students who aren’t willing to work hard (or show up) yet still
expect good grades. Even in college, they said, parents pester professors for
better marks for their little darlings.
In another famous commencement address, J.K. Rowling’s to
Harvard in 2008, the “Harry Potter” author eulogized her own valuable failures.
“Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing
examinations,” she said. “Failure taught me things about myself that I could
have learned no other way.”
If we agree that wisdom, confidence and a better Apple are
gifts of failure, then why are we so afraid to allow our children to experience
it? In a culture where failure is not well-enough understood as necessary to
growth — and accomplishment is diminished by a code of equal outcomes that
enshrines entitlement — then no one gets wiser or better. And a nation
populated by such people may not survive.
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