Failure is an incredibly powerful tool for learning.
Any industry that’s important, complex, and dynamic takes the time to examine failures. We believe the lessons learned from failures may make us smarter—even stronger. But that doesn’t make failure any more fun, so most of us naturally try to avoid failure at all costs. Failure is hard, even painful. As Stanford Professor Bob Sutton and IDEO Partner Diego Rodriguez often say at the design school, “Failure sucks, but instructs.”
Fear of failure holds us back from learning all sorts of new skills, from taking on risks, and tackling new challenges. Creative confidence asks that we overcome that fear. You know you are going to drop the ball, make mistakes, and go in a wrong direction or two. But you come to accept that it’s part of learning. And in doing so, you are able to remain confident that you are moving forward, despite the setbacks.
We are humans and as humans we make mistake. Mistakes help us to learn and to get better at whatever we do. If we make mistakes, our decisions and actions might fail. So what? We get the chance to try again and find even better solutions. Only if we accept a lack of achievement and if we give up trying, we fail as a person.
