On the benefits of failure.

Failure.

This word has become the greatest fodder for the motivational meme industry since the invention of cats!

And there’s a sentiment there that I can certainly appreciate, but I think there’s something not quite right…

Failure is not a good thing. In fact, failure is a bad thing.

“We tried everything. We did everything we could. But we failed to save your husband’s life.”

Try turning that into a positive lesson about life and learning.

All of these memes that try to make a positive thing out of failing are missing the point, in my opinion.

Failing is not a positive thing. Failing is… well… failing.

The positivity should not be in celebrating failure; rather, it should be in avoiding or rejecting the concept.

If you have failed, then it’s too late to do anything about it. If you still have a chance to try again, then put simply, you haven’t failed yet.

There are only two sources of failure: You run out of opportunities to try again or you give up and decide not to try again.

If you try something and it doesn’t work, you haven’t failed. You just haven’t succeeded /yet/.

If there’s a deadline attached—perhaps you’re working on a project at your job—or a limited number of attempts—perhaps you’re participating in a tournament of some kind—then you can fail when either of these runs out.

But otherwise, the only way you can fail is if you give up. (Or if you die, of course. I suppose that’s the great deadline of life!)

So if you don’t have a deadline, and you don’t give up, then you can never fail. You just keep going until you succeed.

It’s no surprise that this sense of failure has pervaded the culture so overwhelmingly when our education system, the system we are all raised by, is predicated on a pass/fail model. You have a fixed amount of time to learn, a fixed number of attempts at the test, and you either pass or fail. This is our formal introduction to the concept of achievement.

But most of the trials that we face in life are not like this.

Most of the challenges that we encounter, it is our choice whether we try to overcome them or walk away; it is our call how much time we spend on a problem, how many attempts we make.

And the key to thinking about these motivationally is not to redefine failure but to recognise that to falter is not to fail. Struggle is part of the process. Failure is, by definition, the end of that process. But if you’re still going, no matter how slowly, then you haven’t failed.