I read somewhere, “Nothing is as dangerous as a perfect safety” and wonder living in an age of disruptions, are we prepared for unexpected? The focus of researchers and academia on overemphasizing success has given the young generations a distorted view of reality. It is time to realize the upside of failures and start teaching that it’s okay to fail but not acceptable to give up.
Megan Mc-Artle in her book, “Upside of down” writes that failure is only bad if you don’t learn from your mistakes & it is a management fallacy that we have to be sure about everything. The biggest failure is the denial and staying committed to your wrong decisions. We were raised to believe that success comes from being brilliant and being brilliant means we find work easy, which is a fallacy. As research shows that the biggest contributor of success is not your IQ but ‘grit’. A recent research by Wharton Business School concluded that entrepreneurs whose startup failed become more marketable, as fortune 500 companies value hardworking failed startups founders for problem solving and to act quickly with scarce resources. Research elicit that the best way to retain knowledge for longer time duration are the lessons learnt during failures.
Development project may not be fruitful but will be a calculated risk to improve the product so innovation and research and development should have ample room for failures. After all failures are small milestones on the road to success
Peter Sims in “How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries” writes that you achieve what is the focus of your efforts. If you are so afraid to fail, your prime focus would be, not to fail and not on “Winning”, which makes it most likely to fail. For instance, if you are defending champion in a race if you keep on focusing on competitors’ position rather than diverting your energies and focus on reaching the finish line, chances are you will fail. The rational mind wants to be in the state of stability, for rational mind success as well as failure is departure from stability. So if failure doesn’t last then so does success. We need to change the mindset that failure is bad as perfection comes after practice and failing.
Life is not a Hollywood movie where the hero’s tagline is, “failure is not an option for me”!! David Gallisin says there are two types of innovators ingenious/visionary like Mozart who got the ideas for symphonies in his head and wrote it down, these are God gifted visionaries, which are extremely rare, however the other types which are in abundance are experimental innovators, who carefully experiment and improvise like Beethoven, if you see his notes there are so many cuttings and pinching of pen on paper that reflects his frustrations and pages and pages before a master piece symphony was composed. That’s how success looks like in real life you take small incremental steps and calculate affordable failures and improvise on the way till you reach desired results.
It is interesting to note that Pixar was formed as a computer hardware firm and a fraction of it was doing experiments with digital films, now Steve Jobs buys Pixar after he was ousted from “Apple inc.”, the company he formed. Pixar was failing, John Lesseter is fired by Disney and joins Pixar. The first attempts of digital films were so unimpressive but they never gave up. Jobs have already invested more than 50 million dollars and had to choose whether to invest any money on digital animations. Since the animations just costed the pay of Lesseter Pixar started with experimenting short films and slowly gained respect and recognition. Fast forward when “Toy story” was released it made history and “Finding Nemo” & “Cars” were next big blockbusters. So how did Pixar and jobs pull such an incredible success, is by investing in small bets one at a time and “affordable failures”.
Whereas Polaroid thought that they had cutting edge technology and were innovation leader and don’t need to improvise or invest in emerging technologies like digital films and then Polaroid was history. These lessons tells that development project may not be fruitful but will be a calculated risk to improve the product so innovation and research and development should have ample room for failures. After all failures are small milestones on the road to success. Therefore, it’s time to realize like Mc-Artle said, “if you don’t make failure as an option then success will not be an option as well.”
Dr Faryal Razzaq is an Assistant Professor at SZABIST- Islamabad with the first PhD in emotional Intelligence at Pakistani workplace. She is a Research Consultant and Master Trainer and CEO of The FEEEL ,first digital emotional preventive care service provider