The power of failure

You sure must be thinking that recession has had a profound effect on me and I am out of my mind, so how about this -

“Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it’s dead. But we’re allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that’s how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again. If I’m not free to fail, I will never start another book, I’ll never start a new thing.”

These are the words of Madeleine L’Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time. I took these from a book I am reading these days called Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I’ll write a review of this book as and when time permits; needless to say it’s an eye-opener as was his earlier book called Flow.

Our society (the whole system, the education system) puts an undue emphasis on success stories and no-one chronicles (worthwhile) failures – not even media, whose only survival strategy is based on all things -ve . Sometimes, even our families are a culprit. So we fall prey to this whole ’success’ sutra and with age, fail (and forget and become loathe) to take any risk – why? For the risk of failure. Yet, many successes are based on previous failures.

So go and fail but don’t fail at the same thing again and again, or maybe even that is acceptable. I am not sure on this last one