Failure Is A Better Teacher Than Success

As Henry Ford said, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently”. We all might have used Post-It Notes (by 3M) at least once in our lives. Post-It Notes, that are hugely used now, were a result of a failed experiment. In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M, was working to create a super-strong adhesive to be used in planes in aerospace industry. Instead, he created a weak adhesive agent that was reusable as well as it didn’t leave a trace when peeled off from the surface. For five years he managed to promote this adhesive within the company, in vain. Dr. Silver himself didn’t know the marketable use of it. In 1973, one of Dr. Silver’s colleagues, Art Fry, propounded the idea of using that adhesive to stick his bookmarks in his hymnbook in a church choir where he sang. Art Fry used slips of paper to mark the pages in his hymnbook but often lost them or found them juxtaposed while singing. Then it occurred to him that Dr. Silver’s adhesive could be used to create a better bookmark. That is how 3M’s very successful product, Post-It Notes came into being after 5 years of being touted as a “failed-product”. Perhaps the world would have never been able to see a great invention if Dr. Spencer hadn’t failed.

People who fail, they try. At least they do that. As Thomas Edison very famously put it, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 reasons that don’t work”. Failure can teach us what not to do (and there are many don’ts) while success teaches us what to do; failure can teach us what doesn’t work (and there are many things that don’t work) while success teaches us what works; failure might increase your confidence while success might increase your ego. Success might always be glorified but failure is exemplified as failure teaches more lessons than success. This is because people don’t fail, it’s ideas that fail – due to lack of proper execution, lack of sufficient resources or competent leadership, lack of revenue model or non-acceptance. What would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had given up after a streak of failures including personal, professional and physical failures? What would have happened if J.K. Rowling had given up on her ambition to write novels because her impoverished parents thought that writing novels would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension and when her marriage life was devastated, she was jobless and a lone parent? What would have happened if Steve Jobs had given up doing what he loved when he was fired from Apple? And, many more. The world wouldn’t have been as beautiful as it is today wihtout these great people who failed, but came back and changed the world.

The more you fail, the sharper your insights are about not doing a thing. The more you fail, the closer you get to yourself. The more you fail, the more you try; the more you try, the more you are closer to success. So failure is essentially a stepping-stone towards success. Take deep breaths, sit back, squint at your failures, analyze them, learn from them and move on. That’s what a teacher makes you do. Failure is a teacher, perhaps the best teacher.