When we make a mistake in our creative work, we tend to hide it from others or even from ourselves. Overall, people see failure as an unpleasant experience. But isn’t it true that failure is all about the human mindset and thought patterns?
What if we gave our team a new definition of failure?
Failure means you’ve reached a new goal, and you are ready for your next attempt. Failure indicates that you have had the chance to learn about the skills that you need to develop. And failing means you’ve proven dedication to something important to you.
In fact, if you fail rarely, you may lose motivation. According to University of Arizona research, there is an optimal failure rate: if you fail 15% of the time, you will improve your learning, keep trying, and stay motivated.
Working on important and risky projects makes individuals naturally uncomfortable. If you want to make your team comfortable and achieve great results, encourage them to think outside the box and make failure a cause for celebration. So, create a learning environment for your team that celebrates the positive aspects of failure and promotes growth.
Astro Teller, CEO of X (formerly Google X), focuses on great dreams, visions, and strategies in a TED Talk, and put things in a shockingly new perspective. He shares how, by celebrating failure, his team, the “moonshot factory,” is able to enjoy working on risky and innovative ideas to tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems by attempting outlandish experiments and daring to fail.
If there’s an Achilles’ heel in one of our projects, we want to know it now, upfront, not way down the road.
Astro Teller
how failure can be positive?
- People who fail frequently learn perseverance in the face of adversity. Thomas Edison is well known for inventing the incandescent light bulb, among many other important achievements during the Age of Electricity. He is claimed to have tried a thousand different filaments before finding one that worked.
- People who are successful continue to do the same thing. They are obliged to adapt and alter when they fail.
- Bounce back after failing makes you mentally stronger and those who come back from failure gain a deeper understanding of why they failed.
- Failure challenges you to rethink your strategy and explore something different by ‘thinking outside the box.’
- Admitting that you have failed, allows you to cancel a project early enough to save time and money. It may also allow you to choose an alternative path to achieve your goal.
Never underestimate failure’s magical power. You can’t be afraid of failure if you want to reach your full potential and become your personal best. Fear will only keep you from giving all that you have.
Thank for reading! Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think about failure.
Nazli Mohammad 