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In praise of failure

Failing is among life’s least pleasant experiences, but nothing else is as essential to success.

Marisa Taylor | October 2008 issue

College commencement speeches are meant to be inspiring, uplifting affairs that impart a few words of wisdom to graduates about to set out to make their way in the world. So among the many topics British author J.K. Rowling might have broached in her June 5th address to Harvard’s 2008 graduating class, failure was certainly an offbeat choice. After all, what did she, the author of the wildly successful Harry Potter series, know about failure? Moreover, how could it be relevant to this particular audience of young adults, among the best and brightest of their generation?

But in her speech, titled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” she told the crowd, “What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure ... And by every standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”

For all of Rowling’s success—nearly 400 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide, and her fortune is estimated at $1.1 billion—her early life and forays into fiction were far more modest. Her childhood dream was to write novels, but her parents, who came from underprivileged backgrounds, worried she would never survive and encouraged her to do something technical or otherwise financially practical. She compromised by studying classics in college and afterward worked as a researcher for Amnesty International. But it wasn’t until she found herself as a young divorcee living on state benefits that she hit, as she said, “rock bottom.”

“I was jobless, a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless,” Rowling told the crowd of soon-to-be Harvard alumni. But it was during this dark time that she was able to reach for her goal of writing fiction because, in her mind, she had nothing left to lose. “Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.”

Her failure, in fact, ended up as the catalyst for her tremendous success. “The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive,” she said in her speech. “You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”

Sounds a bit depressing and, to be honest, not much fun. After all, failure isn’t one of the things most college graduates look forward to putting on their CVs. In fact, failing is an experience most people go out of their way to avoid, rather than embrace. Attitudes toward failure differ around the world: In Asia, it’s something to be ashamed of, to be hidden from family and friends; many European countries have tried to legislate against it by creating social-welfare systems that protect citizens from the most dramatic economic catastrophes; in the U.S., it can sometimes be a badge of honour, but only if the failure has an immediate popularity benefit, like losing the American Idol competition but getting your 15 minutes of fame.

Of course, failure isn’t an experience to be deliberately sought, and cushioning ourselves against its harshest blows makes perfect sense. But failure isn’t something to be despised or ashamed of, either. As J.K. Rowling went on to say in her speech, “Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.” Failure may feel horrible, but it can actually be good for you.

That’s not a message we hear a lot about these days. Saunter into the self-help aisle of the average bookstore and it’s clear just how success-obsessed we are. The shelves are crammed with books purporting to reveal, in flowery language and pastel colours, how we can lose weight, make money, go green and have better relationships with more sex—all after minimum effort and without setbacks.

Yet some of history’s most impressive successes started out as big, fat failures. Ludwig van Beethoven’s teacher told the young musician he was hopeless as a composer; then Beethoven went deaf, yet he still managed to compose some of the most ravishing music ever written. Abraham Lincoln suffered a nervous breakdown and lost several Congressional bids before becoming a U.S. president and abolishing slavery. Business woman Carly Fiorina disappointed her parents by dropping out of law school after one semester, but went on to be vice-president of AT&T and CEO of Hewlett-Packard. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who flunked sixth grade, suffered a string of catastrophic defeats against the Nazis and was booted out of office after the war, yet is still considered his country’s greatest wartime leader. He summed up his philosophy like this: “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

The stories of the world’s most successful failures suggest that what matters most is not whether you win or lose, but how you fail.

That’s a lesson basketball star Michael Jordan took to heart. Jordan, often described as the greatest basketball player of all time, was cut from his high school team the first time he tried out. He went on to lead the Chicago Bulls to six National Basketball Association championships. In a commercial for Nike—famous for its failure-defying tagline “Just do it”—Jordan says, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life—and that is why I succeed.”

Sports is an arena in which failure would seem to have no place, but the experience of Billy Beane suggests otherwise. As a teenager, Beane had it all. He was good-looking and athletic, the star of his high school football, basketball and baseball teams. But once his professional career with the New York Mets started in 1980, things took a turn for the worse. He averaged a measly .219 batting average with only three home runs. It went on like that for 10 years.

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