Is failure an option?
I am sure you must have heard this mighty motivational catchphrase ‘Failure is not an option’. Some people believe that this is NASA’s official motto. Well, it is not! Others believe that this phrase was uttered by NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz during the Apollo 13 mission when the mission went wrong and the possibility of losing Apollo 13 astronauts was very high. But, he didn’t utter these words during the actual mission.
In reality, this phrase was actually made famous in the movie Apollo 13 when Ed Harris (playing the role of Gene Kranz) says these magical words. By the way, if you haven’t seen this movie, you must. Tom Hanks is just wonderful.
I am not a big fan of FINAO (that’s Failure Is Not An Option!) though. Given our increasingly crazy world, failure is always a possibility. Management gurus will counter FINAO with arguments such as ‘fail early and learn from your mistakes’ or ‘fail fast and bounce back faster’ etc.?
But, I do love a concept that is correctly attributable to NASA and it is super actionable. I am talking about Single Point Of Failure (SPOF). SPOF is defined as a part of a system, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. NASA sent the Galileo probe to Jupiter in the 80s, and it had 30 SPOFs. Mars landing has 100 SPOFs. The most dangerous NASA mission so far was the recent deployment of the James Webb telescope 1.6 million miles away from Earth and this mission had 344 SPOFs. Many times, you may not have a 100% solution for each SPOF, but at least you could have redundancies (or colloquially speaking plan Bs) for SPOFs or you could call off the mission if one SPOF is breached.
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Now you may wonder why SPOF is relevant for us mortals as we go on earning our daily bread (whether it is white sandwich one or the organic, vegan, whole wheat focaccia one). Here is my point. In our daily lives, we face multiple challenges and tend to worry a lot all the time. SPOF could be a good framework to judge the relative importance of various challenges or worries to identify the real SPOFs that we should focus on. I have seen many folks in my professional career who are on the verge of a breakdown and clearly need a break, but refuse to accept that this could be a SPOF for their careers or even lives and keep on going. Or students refusing to accept that a wrong academic choice made due to parental or societal pressure could be a SPOF that could lead to agony or suicidal tendencies. Or professionals who chase designations and money time and again without realizing that the inability to love your work could instead be a SPOF.
In real life, failure is certainly a possibility, but identifying Single Points Of Failures will go a long way in reducing this possibility.
Something to think about…
Chief Champion of Creativity at Ipsos | Global Leader Creative Excellence | CEO | Grand Effie Juror | Global Citizen - RSA, UK, USA, GER (currently in Hamburg, Germany).
1 年Love your random walks and this one is a good lesson that none of us is perfect. I have a more drastic saying, "what doen't kill you, makes you stronger." Or get knocked down and get up even stronger. Thanks for sharing.
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1 年Failure in inevitable. It is indeed important milestone (and in plural) of the journey to success. Only person who does not fail is who does not try (new) things. At times, life does not give a fallback option, which may mean a set back after a failure. However, most of the cases the set back is not catastrophic, rather it results in loss of some opportunities or losing some time, which in a long timescale of life does not matter much if we are back on track sooner or change the course towards a new opportunity.?
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1 年It's my personal experience when I try anything new.. I never succeeded but after that I never stop myself from continuing with experience and success, it helps me to the person I'm today.. so failure is key to success ??
Amit, I am a firm believer that all of us should experience failure …not once…but many a times. And not only in studies or sports …but also professionally and sometimes even in personal/love life. The problem is in our culture ….failure is seen as something bad…”oh he was a dud in school”, “can’t kick a ball for nuts”, “she just cant get along with her partner and hence parted”….are the comments you will hear. But probably he/she are not meant to be good at that. They may be good at something else…play the violin, great cooks, a lovely, dependable and trustworthy friend, a great colleague I would always like to work with. The pressure to be first or the best in everything is the reason for many failures among the brighter individuals. And since they have never failed, they cannot fathom what has hit them. And the pressure from parents to be numero uno doesn’t make it easy either. You have to experience failure to succeed.