The Art of the #fail

[Valin]

The American Interest:

Decades of demonizing failure have turned America into a nation of cowards and outcasts. Risk-taking, successful or not, is vital to a resilient society.

Justus Myers

April 25, 2014

 

Learning from failure is increasingly in the zeitgeist. The topic has appeared in sources ranging from the Harvard Business Review to TED talks, Oprah.com, and even a writing prompt in the Common Application for college. High-achieving, college-bound seniors no doubt find this prompt difficult, having rarely been allowed to fail, let alone to learn from it. In contrast, there are those surrounded by a surfeit of failure, whose rational (if depressing) response is often to give up entirely. Both responses should worry us. Those who end up in leadership positions in American life could benefit from an infusion of humility, especially the kind that is earned from chastening experience. Those who are not so well integrated into society would benefit from an American society that was more forgiving of failure.

 

Distinguishing good failure from bad is the subject of popular journalist Megan McArdle’s first book, The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. Although it certainly contains lessons for individuals, the book is not simply about harnessing failure for the sake of self-improvement. It more broadly addresses features of, and responses to, failure across a variety of domains. McArdle makes a strong case for promoting a culture of beneficial failure—a culture that America has uniquely embodied, but that is at risk of wilting away as we seek to inoculate ourselves against adversity of all kinds. The book is best read not as a systematic theory but as a series of thematically related essays distinguishing unrecoverable failure from its more beneficial cousin—a necessary precursor to learning. The essays, with some overlap, advance three main ideas. First, failure imparts lessons otherwise difficult to learn. Second, failure is inevitable, so what matters is how we respond to it. And third, America should sustain and improve its culture of beneficial failure. She explores these ideas through a series of case studies, interviews, and personal observation—and does so with a sharp analytical eye, wit, and good humor, which should be familiar to anyone who has read her prolific writing elsewhere.

 

McArdle’s lively jaunt through failures large and small draws from diverse examples such as nuclear power plants, hospitals, surgery, Solyndra, General Motors, and welfare reform, to name but a few. These cases often motivate excursions into the behavioral and social science literature, illustrating, for example, our remarkably consistent tendency to overweigh losses relative to gains, or the “normalcy bias” that drives us to “act as if things are fine even when they quite obviously are not.” Frequently, these bad individual tendencies in the face of failure are made worse by herd behavior; we seek temporary safety in social conformity when things take a turn for the worse.

 

(Snip)

[Cyber_Liberty]

How much of the aversion to failure is in response to the leftist urge to punish success at every turn?