Failure…is it really such a bad thing?

Society has lied to you. As a collective we have decided that failure should be treated as the worst possible outcome. But is this really the case? Failing to achieve a set goal lead to negative emotions, and it is important to question whether it is healthy to breed this attitude towards failure. Especially when some of life’s toughest lessons are only truly learned through making mistakes and learning what to do next time.

Academia is the worst culprit for this. An undergraduate degree will teach you how to jump through a hoop. To recite a textbook. Or, to memorise PowerPoint presentations. The process teaches you that failing is the worst outcome, because if you fail then you will receive a bad grade and your career prospects will be ruined.

But this is not the point of research. We research topics to determine the viability of a process, to cure disease, or even to look for something new. But all of these research tasks are more than likely to fail that succeed. This failure can hit like a truck, some have never faced it before, and it can become detrimental to their output. In reality though, a null hypothesis is just as valid an outcome to an experiment and is of real value to society. Proving outright that something does not work is very important in science. Especially if the work is well researched and documented. What is never properly taught, is that failure is an essential component of science – that without a researcher failing to prove a hypothesis, then we could consider that hypothesis true and at that point what would be the point in science?

But we don’t just fail in academia, we also fail (rather consistently) in life and these lessons are perhaps the hardest to overcome. You can set yourself up for an interview, prepare as best you can and perform outstandingly – does that mean you’re guaranteed to be successful? No, life can ultimately be indecisive and just because dots connect does not mean a clear picture can be seen. But it is easy to dismiss failures like this: “the interviewer just didn’t like me” or “they wouldn’t accept my answers to a question.” Whilst it might be the case that you don’t click with a person, there is always some personal responsibility to failure.

Most of the failures you have experienced in life could have been avoided. It is a really harsh lesson to learn, some people will never learn from their mistakes and continue to blame others for their inability to succeed. But as you can probably tell, this is the unhealthy approach and certainly not how to go about living a healthy life. Rather, it is healthier to accept that you have made a mistake and can do things differently next time. Taking this personal accountability that our actions are our own is key to learning from experiences.

Failure should not be treated as an inability to complete a task, instead it should be celebrated as an alternate outcome and valid in its own right. As a collective we should support each other when we fail, rather than simply turning our backs on those that fail, and through perseverance grow as a society. Let us start celebrating failure, to accept we cannot achieve everything we put our minds to and realise that these outcomes are just as important for development. Achievement doesn’t always have to mean succeeding in every goal we set in life.