A niece recently posted something on Facebook that made it clear that she felt some failure in her life. I have no idea what the issue was – I haven’t really gotten into the commenting part of Facebook yet – I’m mostly a lurker. (I think that’s what they call us…) I suspect it was something small, like a grade on a test that was lower than she wanted, something like that.
The issue isn’t really important anyway – the important thing is the failure, and the need to celebrate it.
Sounds odd, I know, in this culture where we’ve tried so hard to make everything about winning at all costs, and measuring people by their perceived “successesâ€. But I really believe in failure as one of the most important components of a truly successful life. Surviving failure well and finding the creative power therein is a critical skill in moving “forward†in life.
When success falls into our lap, we feel complete and whole and important. Our ego tells us we’re on top of the world, and proves it with our success. Success reinforces the “self†we’ve already built – it doesn’t create anything new.
That very sense of completeness and wholeness is the weakness of success. Within that sense of completeness, we’re trapped in the universe we’ve defined for ourselves. We’re trapped in our own ego.
Failing, on the other hand, breaks us. It opens us and makes us feel incompleteness and vulnerability. The harder we tried, and the more we wanted to succeed, the more effective the brokenness of failure is.
In this brokenness we have the opportunity to escape ourselves. The shell of ego that held us is shattered, and an opportunity to expand stands in front of us, waiting for us to embrace the sudden possibility of creating something new.
No doubt failure tastes bitter. It tastes like life has handed us a rejection. Our ego encourages us to wallow in the self-pity of rejection. But biting down hard on that bitter gift and drinking in the creative juice that brokenness offers us will release us from the shell that a success would only have reinforced. Released from the shell, we can grow yet again.
I doubt I could ever learn to look forward to failure. Controlling our ego and learning to embrace the creative potential that failure offers, though, might go a long way toward removing the “fear†that most of us have of failure.
No matter how tiny the failure, squeeze all the creative juice you can from it. Let something new and better emerge from the gift of failure.
