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In praise of failure

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

Even Viagra, surely one of the most successful drugs of all time, started out as a mistake. In 1992, pharmaceutical company Pfizer was testing the drug sildenafil for the alleviation of angina, chest pains caused by heart disease. The men involved in the clinical trials for the medication found that, while it didn’t affect their chest pain very much, it did have a marked effect on their libidos. Pfizer’s blunder launched a multibillion-dollar industry.

“Discoveries we claim come from research are themselves highly accidental,” writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. “They are the result of undirected tinkering narrated after the fact, when it is dressed up as controlled research. The high rate of failure in scientific research should be sufficient to convince us of the lack of effectiveness in its design … Random tinkering is the path to success.”

Jason Zasky learned firsthand the potential of tinkering with an offbeat idea. As a writer for the now-defunct Musician Magazine, he and the the staff were laid off in 1999 when the magazine folded. He found himself walking the streets of New York City with his cousin, who suggested he start a magazine about failure. Now co-founder and editor of the online Failure Magazine (failuremag.com), which just celebrated its eighth anniversary, Zasky jokes, “As soon as I heard those two words together, I like to tell people now, I saw failure as my future.”

The publication features a daily column about historical failures called “This Day in Failure,” and even markets a line of Failure Wear, a collection of mugs, T-shirts, courier bags and baseball caps featuring the magazine’s logo. Zasky now makes a pretty decent living from failure.

And naturally he has a lot of perspective on the topic after eight years writing about it. Mainly, he feels, failure is in the eye of the beholder. “Success is kind of boring,” Zasky says. “Failure is much more interesting to read about, and to study, and certainly to work on. It’s a universal experience we can all relate to.” Often, he says, success is completely accidental, and is built on something that is viewed initially as failure. Take the Canadian cough syrup company, Buckley’s, which has capitalized on failure—in this case, its failure to make a cough syrup that’s palatable.

For the past two decades, Canada’s No. 1 cough syrup company has been running the slogan, “It tastes awful. And it works.” Citing the unique herbal ingredients that make the product so effective—and so awful to ingest—Buckley’s even launched a Bad Taste Tour in which company execs travelled around the country videotaping consumers’ reactions to the product. The winner, wearing a suitably disgusted expression, was featured in a Buckley’s television commercial, with more photos of grossed-out customers appearing on the company’s website (buckleys.com). Other slogans the company has run include owner Frank Buckley quipping, “I wake up with nightmares that someone gives me a taste of my own medicine” and “I came by my bad taste honestly—I inherited it from my father.” The campaign seems to have worked, because the company’s market share increased by 10 percent afterward.

Zasky says his most memorable failure is Moe Norman, who was, he says, “the greatest golfer the world has never known.” Norman, a native of Canada, joined the Professional Golfers’ Association tour in 1959 and quit after fewer than two seasons. His golf swing was impeccable, but his personality was unsuited to the golf world. “If you’ve ever seen the movie Rainman with Dustin Hoffman, he was like the Rainman of golf,” explains Zasky.

If Norman grew bored during a hushed, slow-paced tournament, he might simply lie down on the green while other golfers were playing. His appearance was usually unkempt, and people who knew him speculated that he might be a high-functioning autistic. Even though he didn’t achieve the fame and recognition he might have if he’d had a more conventional personality, he was inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. His unique swing—now known as “the Norman Swing,” consisting of a short backswing and a short follow-through—was unorthodox, extremely accurate and utterly unique. Tiger Woods once said only two golfers in history “owned their swing”: Ben Hogan and Moe Norman.

“Formative defeats are usually a central strand in any successful sportsman’s story—because failure, for almost every athlete, is written into the script,” writes Ed Smith in What Sport Tells Us About Life. “The important question is not whether you will fail, but when, and above all, what happens next.”

Sooner or later, failure is pretty much inevitable. In fact, a life devoid of failure is in many ways not a full life. As J.K. Rowling told this year’s Harvard graduating class, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.” So if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again—but try to fail better.

Marisa Taylor wrote about the silence of an anechoic chamber in the July/August 2008 issue.

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