I think about failure fairly often, not in a “Oh wow, I’m a failure” sense, but more so what it means to me to fail. It sounds sad, but it truly is a check-in on where I feel I am on my path to achieving my goals. As a society and in my experiences working for companies, failure is often looked at as scary and shameful. Failures are not communicated to others, which is a failure in itself. It seems to me that many people don’t chase an idea because there is that chance they will fail, or they’ll be wrong. Can we change this narrative? Can we make it feel like less of a big deal after someone makes a choice that leads to ‘failure’?
Along with many others (see the explosion of the ‘walking pad’), I am trying to get in a walk each day even if it’s only for 10 minutes. I’ve been mildly succeeding - I want to walk outside, not at my desk, and it can be tough to make that time! On the days I have been able to get outside for a walk, I’ve been listening to the podcast Design Better. I’ve been hungry for more design thinking and design talk and this podcast has been able to fulfill some of that hunger. One of the episodes was a chat with David Kelley, the founder of IDEO. If you’re into design, you may have heard this quote from him before, but if you’re not, I’ll enlighten you - “Fail faster to succeed sooner.”
Now, I’ll be honest - I don’t retain a lot of the information from podcasts - mostly because I am a visual learner. That may explain my career choice, eh? Also, I live in a neighborhood where most people have beautiful plants that I pass and become distracted with - often.
Anyways, “Fail faster to succeed sooner.”. You can really look at this from so many perspectives, but I am going to start with where I’ve seen failure as a whole in my life. I asked my mom the other day (hi mom!) what her memory was of my first experience with failure. She reminded me of a time in first grade where I got in trouble for talking in class. In my defense, it was the first class I got to have with my best friend (who I’ve known since I was two years old). The next day, unrelated to my disruptive behavior, I was moved to another classroom. I promised never to talk again if I could just go back to the class with my best friend. She said I kept saying, “I’ll be good! Please don’t make me.” Now, I don’t have this as a core memory, thank goodness, but school was always a serious place for me. I paid attention in class, I did all my work, I did not talk while the teacher was talking - all things ‘good.’ Easy to see a possible connection from what I perceived as a failure to my behaviors that have continued since.
I remember failure in many different ways - failed relationship attempts with boys who didn’t like me back, failed attempts at tumbling passes in cheerleading, failure to diagnose mysterious health questions etc. The one that has stuck out the most to me, looking at my early years, was the only B grade I received in school. Damn you, AP United States History class. That failure had the biggest impact on me, and my self worth for a while. To this day, I am still annoyed by it.
But, hey - I got into a great college in California. I kept moving forward, and in many ways I succeeded.
Since then, I almost failed a course during study abroad (yikes), I started a blog and stopped posting, I started a small business that didn’t go where I intended it to, I had other failed attempts at relationships and I have been unhappy with my progress at different stages in my career - wondering why I couldn’t do something or make what I wanted, happen.
Where has failure led me? In hindsight, I’d say some pretty awesome places with wonderful people. Without thinking twice a few years ago, I started a jogging community, Ventura Joggers Club. Will it succeed? In many ways it has, but I can’t predict the future. I’ve learned to leap often, knowing I’ll find my way like I have many times before. Failure has allowed me to be more comfortable with mistakes, knowing that sometimes those mistakes lead to something better, or something more suited to me or the business/organization.
Now, I’d like to think I am providing a bit more than a ramble, but that’s why I am calling this corner of the internet on my website, ‘musings.’ I hope you’re still with me, and have had some cool thoughts about your own failures running through your head. We’ll see if I can wrap this up with the many thoughts running through my own head.
Returning to my initial point where I was inspired by David Kelley’s quote - where can we bring this human energy of failure into society, into our places of work? Where can we encourage ourselves to create more ideas that don’t work to find the ones that will? Where can we fail, more specifically as designers, that will create even better ideas - or atleast give us the ideas to go after, fail fast so we can succeed sooner?
What’s a failure of yours that has shown you something better? Can we all give others more grace to fail (within boundaries that don’t hurt others) in hopes that we can find more successful ideas to make our world a better place?