Failure is bad.
I just read a post from Micah Baldwin that I found very interesting, so here’s a quick response:
Failure is bad.
Success is good.
Sure, failure can teach you valuable lessons – but so can success, and success has the added benefit of being success.
What the “failure is good” mentality misses is that failure is good only as a means to future success. Micah’s friend did exactly the right thing: he used his past failures to guide him to the choice that he perceives has a greater potential for success. In my book, that merits much more than a, “Fair enough.” Anything else would be actively courting failure – mistaking the process for the goal, and forgetting the lessons of follow-through.
I actually disagree. He let his fear of failing AGAIN drive his decision, not the learning he got from past failures.
Micah Baldwin
12 Dec 09 at 1:00 pm
@Micah: I’ll defer to your direct conversation with him, but I don’t think that the specific case invalidates the point here.
If failure’s a good thing in and of itself, we should strive for it – I should enter the next 100-mile race I see, since I’m guaranteed a DNF. That’s clearly absurd, though. What we want is to succeed.
Trivial success is just as worthless as guaranteed failure, however; I could race against toddlers and win every time. What we really want is meaningful success, and the challenges that result in that outcome always carry the risk of failure.
Ben
12 Dec 09 at 12:13 pm