I bet you have an aunt whose concern sprouts when your exam results are out, or a neighbour who is nosy about the details of your percentile. These well-meaning people and the rest of us, who are fearful of all failures, collectively build a society biased towards success. As a result, the social construction of failure involves a feeling of shame, disappointment and an inability to achieve goals.
The stepping stone proverb or Edison’s filament story do not console. It does not merit repeating that most successful individuals encountered failure. Why? Because we are led to believe that failure is the opposite of success. On the contrary, failure can be a portal of discovery and a flavour of progress.
Failing successfully
There is a growing realisation about the value of failures. Duke University has a course titled ‘Learning to Fail’. It explores ways of using failure as a strategy for learning and experimenting. Down south, a panchayat in Kerala organised trips for those who could not clear the Class 10 exams. An entrepreneur in Tamil Nadu provides a fully-paid stay for students who failed in the Board exams. Many of these initiatives come with counselling and career guidance. The idea is not to encourage failure, but to change the way we look at it.
Those who have never faced failure have a critical gap in their personal experience. Many venture capitalists will not invest in start-up founders who have never failed. Start-ups want to get the warning signals as early and as fast as possible. Thus, failing fast, failing early and failing safely allows them to change course when something does not work. Applied in academic life, this approach supports more reflection and experimentation in learning. Properly leveraged, each failure presents compelling arguments for alternative paths and learning opportunities.
Leveraging failure
An exam failure may affect your immediate admission potential. Yet, with course correction, your experience of failure and resilience will grow. Some failures are preventable, such as losing an exam, despite having the ability. Some other complex failures may occur due to internal and external factors working together, such as in a crop failure. Then there are intellectual failures that happen due to a lack of understanding of the cause-effect relationships.
The first requires routines, reviews, and personal accountability. The second and third need more systemic approaches such as warning scans, weighing options, risk measurements, and experimentations.
Failure is a part of a personal learning journey. But what is more important is to acknowledge, accept and own it, instead of distorting, denying or justifying it. First, reflect on what success and failure look like for you, abandoning the pressures of society. Second, keep your options open and find out what did not work in your approach. Failure can be a piece of convincing evidence to unlearn some old habits. See which of your choices, such as time, actions, methods or ingrained habits need correction. Third, radically innovate your learning practices and life or do a fresh iteration of your current practices.
Resume of failures
For a moment, stop bragging about your success on social media. Imagine a CV of your failures. We fail often but these remain invisible, or we conceal them. List the scholarships that you did not get. Record the positions that you did not hold. That is what Professors like Johannes Haushofer at Princeton and Melanie Stefan from the University of Edinburgh did in separate attempts. The CV of their failures were longer than the regular one.
Inspired by this, a few students of IIM Ahmedabad started an Instagram page to post their failures anonymously. Many others, like entrepreneur Ankur Warikoo and author Amish Tripathi, publicly shared their setbacks. Conferences at Silicon Valley like FailCon gather people from various countries to share their failures. MIT organises a conference titled FAIL!, where scholars and students are encouraged to delve into their personal, academic, and professional failures. Failure is not always a negative conclusion nor is it paradoxical to success; it is just another outcome to humble us.
Failing gracefully
A non-judgemental understanding of failure might help all. This is not to idealise or celebrate failures. Nor is it to demean or disgrace success. Even while the social convenience of success and failures persists, a progressive educational community that renounces such subjective labels will be more tolerant of academic failures. As a society, we can seek practical ways to reframe failure as a portal of discovery, as a moment for iteration and as a point for way-finding.
Anyone who has done anything significant has failed in some way. If you plan to solve problems and experiment with bold ideas, get ready to fail more. Professor Sim Sitkin calls such setbacks as ‘intelligent failures’. Soon you can look back and wonder what a beautiful failure it was. Excellent failures are better than mediocre successes. Wish you intelligent failures and the courage to continue.
Views expressed are personal
The writer is Deputy Secretary with University Grants Commission.
