One Apple A Day #1201

I don't like failures.

Quest for the Holy Grail Tapestries: The Failure of Sir Gawaine (1895–1896) by Sir Edward Burne–Jones, John Henry Dearle, and William Morris. Original from The Birmingham Museum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

I don't like failing or making mistakes.

I don't really.

There's a romance around failures, a myth that I struggle to buy into.

Yes, I know J. K. Rowling was turned down by twelve publishers before she found one willing to publish Harry Potter and make her insanely famous. But are we sure that failures are what we should celebrate?

Failures and mistakes are painful.

Sure, you must take failure into account whenever you decide to do anything, in particular, anything creative or new. It is part of the game.

But that doesn't make it pleasant at all.

Failing hurts.

And sure, every failure or mistake offers an invaluable opportunity to learn. Like any other experience that we go through in life.

Success, too, can teach you a lot, and it's way more fun.

However, the learning must be extracted from good and bad experiences. As the famous American educator John Dewey acknowledged, "we do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience."

So, failure is not fun. If you can, avoid it.

But if it happens - and it most probably will - don't waste it.

Take a pause and reflect so you can extract the learning.

And please, do the same with successes.