I like to think of Thomas Edison. I can see him bending over just one more incarnation of his electric light, hoping that this one will actually work. I can see him trying time and again to get a sound through a wire, tirelessly changing, trying and changing again to find what will work. But, more than that I can see a man who was good at failure. Yes, failure. Modern usage of the word implies that a failure is someone who is no good, someone who just didn't make the grade. However, I would like to suggest that some of the biggest successes in this world have been accomplished by the biggest failures. There is a song from the musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that says, “From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success.” In other words, you cannot have success unless you first have failure.
The story is told of one of my distant ancestors, King Bruce of Scotland who in the fight for the independence of his countrymen tried six times to defeat the enemy and each time was driven back, suffering terrible losses. Beaten, sore and despairing, King Bruce decided that it was no use continuing the fight. He sat dejected, in a small hut, pondering on the fate of his countrymen in the face of this failure when he noticed above him a small spider. As King Bruce watched, the spider attempted to bridge the gap between two beams in the roof. Each time he swung out he failed and missed his mark and each time he climbed back up and tried again. Six times he tried and failed. Six times he climbed the beam and tried again. By this time, King Bruce was intensely interested in the spider. For the seventh time the spider tried to reach it's goal and finally succeeded. King Bruce, reportedly spurred on by the lesson of the spider, immediately gathered his forces for another strike on the enemy and was victorious.
King Bruce failed six times and only succeeded once. Thomas Edison failed thousands of times and succeeded only a few. How many times do we stop ourselves, our children, our friends and others from attempting something that 'might fail' as though failure were the enemy. We tell people that they are not talented so don't sing, or that they are not gifted in mathematics so don't be a scientist, or that they have no chance of becoming an Olympic runner so don't run.
I have recently met a girl who was looking for something new to do in her life and happened to pick up a flier advertising a local scholarship pageant. She had never been in a pageant and thought it might be interesting. Her friends and family however, discouraged her from being in the pageant because she wasn't the 'pageant type' and they didn't want to see her fail. She applied anyway, attended and was finally crowned a winner.
Like the blind man who climbed Mt. Everest and the childhood cripple who broke the four-minute mile barrier, it isn't our innate abilities that make us successful, but our willingness to fail enough times to make success possible. Thomas Edison said that success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Can we afford to wait around for large amounts of inspiration, gifts or talents in a given area before we will be willing to attempt something?
When I was in college, I was not considered gifted in music. In fact, my teachers thought I was a little slow where music composition was concerned. That verdict stopped me for a while, but I decided to write music anyway, in spite of my lack of innate ability. The result is that I was able to write hundreds of pieces of music for many different occasions, each with its own success story. In college I failed to make the grade, but by perseverance I have succeeded in overcoming my feelings of inadequacy and have produced many things that have been a benefit to the people in my life. If I had never put pen to paper risking failure and rejection, I could not have known the joy of success and the happiness of knowing that I CAN write music. Thus, success and failure are inseparable. If you fail to fail, you will fail to succeed.
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