The value of failure

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. Thomas Edison

Many of us are afraid of failure and of course it can be an extremely painful process: failing an exam, failing to get in to the university of your choice, failing to get the job of your dreams.

However, I cannot advocate highly enough the value of failure. Or perhaps more precisely the value of learning what to do when you fail. Because it is inevitable that we will fail at some point.

Nevertheless large numbers of girls arrive at their senior school with no experience whatsoever of failure because, with the best of intentions, their parents and teachers have encouraged them to do activities at which they already excel or which are chosen precisely because they can be negotiated safely.

It is not impossible that these same high-achieving and talented girls will continue to make their way through education without experiencing any significant failures. Sometimes this is because they are genuinely extremely talented and find that new things come easily to them, but sometimes it is because they avoid challenges precisely because they seek to avoid failure. They have become so used to success that their very self-worth becomes predicated on an image of never failing at anything.

So what happens if your first experience of failure is when you are at university or even later? Unsurprisingly it can be extremely difficult to deal with. There are those who find their self-confidence shattered as they struggle to understand why things have gone wrong. They are not used to picking themselves up, learning from the experience and moving on.

Failure at this stage can make people feel that their ability to do anything well again has been compromised. It can feel as though everything on which you have built your self-confidence has crumbled around you.

Of equal or perhaps greater concern is the fact that if you have not experienced failure until after leaving school it is likely that you have failed to push yourself, failed to get the best out of yourself and failed to take advantage of all the opportunities on offer at so many independent schools. You will have been sticking to the tried and tested, to what you can already do. We fail when we try new things, when we try things that are more difficult, when we really test ourselves. And that is also when we make the most rapid progress.

If you find something difficult you cannot improve by avoiding it and seemingly making your life easier. You will improve by analysing what went wrong and taking steps to do things differently in the future. If you fail, you learn to pick yourself up and tough it out instead of wallowing in self pity. You get stronger. You can enjoy your life more because you know that failure is not really so bad. You lose your fear of public humiliation, you learn to be the one to ask the embarrassing question when it seems that everyone else understands. You learn to grab life by the scruff of the neck and get the most out of it. After all, most people, as they reach old age, regret the things that they have never tried not those that they have. Do not be paralysed by fear of failure or of making a fool of yourself. Research has shown that other people hardly notice your most humiliating moments because they are almost always simply thinking about other things more pertinent to their own lives.

In brief, I advocate failure for the following reasons:

• to get the most out of life
• to learn as much and as rapidly as you can
• to become stronger.