Failure: No Badge of Honor; No Lesson-Teacher, Either

It does seem that in general it's better to try and fail than never to have tried at all. However – it's possible this idea has become perverted over the years so that the emphasis has shifted to the fail part instead of the try part.

This is an issue that my friend Mark, a film producer, has come up against as he wades into the tech pools, noticing all kinds of talk of failure around him. In his role as an investor, he says, "Am I going to invest in the guy who was confronted with unexpected
challenges and failed, or the guy who was confronted with unexpected
challenges and rose to the occasion to triumph, or at the very least,
avert failure? For me, the answer is clear." Failure does nothing for him.

Me, neither. As a hiring manager and as an entrepreneur, I've never really been all that impressed by failure. I just can't see how bad habits won't be repeated, and finding the source of those failures isn't always so clear. Most of all, it has always seemed to me that if a person found themselves in the midst of a failure it's because they had bad judgment. About any aspect of it. And if they have bad judgment, I don't need that near me and my team.

When I was first starting out at The Industry Standard in 1998 (when the magazine itself was first starting out), I did a piece on how failure was "a California thing." Very much the ethos of Silicon Valley – big failures indicated a willingness to take big risks. I think it's a bit misplaced, though, and perhaps a little bit too much machismo, too.

And I think Mark's on to something very specific. A study released last year would agree with his outlook. In this study, by MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, monkeys were rewarded and punished for success and failure, respectively. It turns out, positive feedback on success can actually transform our brains, for the better. On the other hand, negative feedback on failure doesn't teach us all that much. (The exception would be severe, severe negative feedback, such as violence and physical pain.)

Let's not quash attempts at big ideas, but let's not glorify their failure, either.