New York City is hosting a very interesting exhibition: it’s called the Museum of Failure. The travelling exhibition, which highlights over 150 unsuccessful commercial ideas, wants to get people to discuss and learn from failure.
The festival is curated by Samuel West, a clinical psychologist, who hopes it’ll help people realise that failure isn’t as bad or scary as they imagine and that you can learn a lot even from a flop. “When people realise that big brands like Coca-Cola, Oreo and Colgate, despite all their money and experience, have faced failure too, they feel liberated,” he says.
West isn’t the only one to see failure as a learning opportunity. Singer Taylor Swift, Olympian Abhinav Bindra and Navy Seals commander Jocko Willink hold similar beliefs. They may be on first-name terms with success, but they see failure as a part of the succeeding process.
None of them believes that failure is painless, or easy to digest. Of course, it hurts and delivers a big punch to our ego. When we fail at something, we fixate on the failure, pull it apart and inspect it from all angles. We certainly spend more time on our mistakes than we do on our successes. But that is when the magic happens: somewhere during the agonising process, most of us figure out where we went wrong and what we can do differently the next time around.
Swift says you just need to give yourself “permission to fail”. At the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Awards, where the singer won the Innovator Award, she said, “The hundreds or thousands of dumb ideas that I’ve had are what led me to my good ideas…. I try as hard as I can not to fail because it’s embarrassing, but
I give myself permission to, and you should too.”
Bindra, who faced many defeats before he won an Olympic gold medal in 2008, has a similar take on the battles of life. Success is about learning, he says. You are going to fail more than you succeed, especially in sports. The mission is to keep learning from those failures and getting better.
Willink, who started a leadership consultancy after retiring from the US Navy, has the most unique approach to failure. In his 20 years with the Navy Seals, he reportedly said ‘Good’ to anyone who came to him complaining about a problem. He says it would infuriate the troops but it also motivated them to find a way to succeed. Didn’t get the supplies they wanted? A ‘Good’ would push them to figure out how to manage without them. Didn’t get promoted? Willink’s reaction would make them use the extra time to get better at the job.
Basically, the commander wants people to keep fighting the good fight. “Good means you’re still alive. You’re still breathing. And you’ve still got some fight left in you. So, get up, dust off, reload, recalibrate, re-engage, and go out on the attack,” is Willink’s advice.
The secret is to never give up. Quit, and all hope of success is lost. Change your tack and keep going, and you still have a chance to succeed. Remember, it’s often the last key in the bunch that opens the lock.
Shampa Dhar-Kamath
Delhi-based writer, editor and communication coach
shampadhar@gmail.com