In the summer of 2015, I was in Florence (Italy) with family and I decided to
visit the town of Vinci (birth place of Leonardo da Vinci). In Vinci, there is
a small museum dedicated to Leonardo’s work “Codex Atlanticus”. Every time I
came across a machine that Leonardo designed, the description, without fail,
talked about a particular problem that Leonardo wanted to solve. Leonardo da
Vinci was well aware of his surroundings and at the very same instant he also
questioned the conventional wisdom. If we come to modern times, Steve Jobs, who
said “creativity is connecting things “, was able to generate ideas after ideas
because he spent his entire life experiencing, observing as well as exploring
new and unrelated things.
All of us, who never failed an exam, wouldn’t know how it feels when one fails. My suggestion, go and fail at least once. Nothing happens (a back paper, repeat of the same class or worse, a broken heart!!)… world does not come to an end. On the contrary, we get to learn something very profound… that, failing is normal. Normalcy after a failure could be an unorthodox outcome in the Indian context, but when we fail, we harvest learnings and eventually innovate. The world probably still be using candles if Edison ever gave a hoot about failures.
In the context of Indian culture, “FAIL” is a four letter forbidden word. There is a time pressure to succeed and therefore no scope to try and fail. The problem is compounded because we have decided to focus on only certain types of failures: failing in an exam is a very bad thing (- now your chances of becoming a professional are dim!!) BUT failing to detect an emotion is alright (- your character is not so important!!). This particular approach makes us goal oriented (or target/agenda driven). When we fail or succeed, there is no learning because we have been indifferent (or careless) of the process (or the method). On the other hand, if we are not “only goal oriented” then we look at everything intently, closely, and carefully and when we fail, we learn something.
In the context of Indian culture, “FAIL” is a four letter forbidden word. There is a time pressure to succeed and therefore no scope to try and fail. The problem is compounded because we have decided to focus on only certain types of failures: failing in an exam is a very bad thing (- now your chances of becoming a professional are dim!!) BUT failing to detect an emotion is alright (- your character is not so important!!). This particular approach makes us goal oriented (or target/agenda driven). When we fail or succeed, there is no learning because we have been indifferent (or careless) of the process (or the method). On the other hand, if we are not “only goal oriented” then we look at everything intently, closely, and carefully and when we fail, we learn something.
In sports, failure is treated as a setback and that’s why there is a discussion about it, learnings are implemented… more practice, a better strategy, a new set of tactics….. and we go again to play with everything we have.
1 comment:
Interesting post. Fully agree, failure is directly prepositional to innovation and success in whole. Some of the most successful societies has high tolerance towards failure, like US. In one of the statistics, 30% of new businesses open in USA close in its first year. Failure is considered as normal as success, and specially on the west cost, and it can be equated to innovation on west cost.
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