"Celebrating Failure"

"Celebrating Failure"

Our friend, Thomas Edison, once remarked -- rather famously! -- that he didn't fail to invent the lightbulb 1,000 times. No! He just discovered 1,000 ways that didn't work. 

In this exercise, bare your soul!

1. Tell us about a time this past semester that you failed -- whether in this class, or outside of this class. Don't spare any details! It'd be even better if there was something you tried several times this semester, and failed each time. 

- This may sound a little random, but it was a really good learning exercise for me. I have recently cut down 7 fifty foot plus oak trees in my back yard. What I soon learned was that cutting down the tree is the easy part. The difficulty came from trying to remove the stumps out of the ground. After a little bit of digging I gave up and called someone with the proper knowledge and tools and equipment to actually remove the stumps. He came over and we agreed on a price. He ground down the stumps and then he left. However, a few weeks later I was ready to put pavers down in the backyard but the stumps were not ground down low enough so I thought I would just go dig the rest out with a shovel. Again massive failure, I would not live long enough to ever dig those stumps out of the ground, so I called him back. This time I gave much more clear instructions on what I was going to do with this finished area. With clear instructions and the use of a $40,000 dollar machine my mission was finally accomplished.

 

  

 

2) Tell us what you learned from it.  

-One of the main takeaways for me on this was my lack of knowledge on how to remove stumps and how much effort that it actually requires to remove. My lack of knowledge was soon revealed once he started digging in my backyard. Root systems are a lot like icebergs. There may only be a little root sticking up out of the ground, but there is a massive root system sprawling in every direction underground that I was unaware of. In this case I learned that you don’t have to know everything yourself to get something accomplished. I needed to hire an expert on this matter to get the job done right. A neat ending to this story that I will share is after this man worked at my house for about two and a half hours he would not even accept my $100.00 payment that we agreed upon at the beginning of the job. You see, I was telling him about an upcoming mission trip to Haiti and he said just use that money to buy extra rice and beans for the people in Haiti. And as he was leaving he actually reached into his wallet and pulled out another $100.00 bill and gave it to me to use in Haiti. I learned from my failure how to ask for help. I feel like my failure in one endeavor turned into a success in another.

 

  

 

 

3) Reflect, in general, on what you think about failure. Failure is hard, isn't it? It's embarrassing, sure, but it also means that we have to change something about ourselves. Talk about how you handle failure (emotionally, behaviorally). Finally, talk about how this class has changed your perspective on failure -- are you more likely to take a risk now than you were four months ago? 

Failure is just a part of life. If you don’t ever experience failures in your life then you are probably not ever taking any kind of risk at all. Of course none of us want to fail especially if front of others. Most people think of failures as a sign of weakness. However, I think it is just the opposite. Just thinking about some of our recorded exercises in this class reminds me of a little failure followed by success. My first pitch I did, I literally was reading my pitch word for word. By the time we got to the third elevator pitch I was so comfortable that I actually went out on location in public where my service was going to be used. Once you fail and get past it only then can you grow. Now the fear of failure can be overcome much more easily.