You know what? Failure friggin sucks. Seems like there’s been a lot of buzz over the past few years about Failure Chic– how it’s ok to fail. It’s ok to crash & burn. But it seems to me that most of these blog posts and articles are written by people who’ve never experienced true failure. The kind where you’ve put in everything you have (and then some!)– money, emotional energy… even years of your precariously short little life– and yet you find yourself holding the shattered scraps of a once-vivid dream. There are no redeeming qualities about failure. Saying “but I learned from it” is just a lame attempt to rationalize that steaming pile of cognitive dissonance slopping around in your brain. I think our recent glorification of failure is an #EpicFAIL. Like cat-stuck in-a-birdcage-fail
Because we can learn from our successes just as much as we can from our failures. So, what I’d rather see is a switch from Failure Chic to Learning Chic. Steve Jobs said he realized after he was ousted from Apple (sorry, obligatory Apple reference) that making awesome stuff in an awesome company should be the goal rather than profits. Success should be a byproduct of a lifelong love of learning.
So, forget failure. And forget success. Let’s learn how to make awesome stuff.