You can’t fail unless someone tells you you’ve failed. Usually that person is someone else, but as @ubersiren points out, it could be you telling yourself that you’ve failed. Still, I think that the internal feedback (what we tell ourselves) does more about what others have said failure does: shows us we’ve made a mistake, and there’s a problem to be solved.
However, when someone else tells you you’ve failed, what can you do? You can’t know why they think you’ve failed. You can know what they tell you, but that might not be accurate, and they might be lying, or they might be misguided. Designation of failure is an opinion. Usually someone else’s opinion. Opinion is opinion. It becomes right or wrong depending upon what other people think. If someone tells you you’ve failed, and you believe them, you may stop doing whatever it is you were doing, and the world may lose a brilliant doer of that thing.
Last night I heard a story about Benjamin Zander, a conductor and musician. His biography says that, at the age of nine, he became a protege of Benjamin Britten. Well, not so fast. In an interview on The World last night, he told more of the story. It seems that he had written a piece—maybe for school; maybe for a competion—and someone looked at it, and said it was worthless crap.
His mother, being an immigrant and not understanding the ways of the British, nevertheless sent the piece to Benjamin Britten. His opinion was the same, and different. Yeah, it was crap, but it was also brilliant—for a nine-year-old. He took Zander under his wing, and Zander blossomed. Were it not for a fluke and an ignorant mother who didn’t know she had been beat, Zander may well have given up composing.
There are tons of stories of writers who send manuscripts to publisher after publisher, up to forty or fifty, and finally someone publishes the novel and it becomes a huge success. For every one of those writers, I’ll bet there are 20, just as good, who give up sending out the story just before they get to the one who will publish them.
It’s just opinion, and opinion can be wrong, but it also has huge power. It can turn success into failure, and it can teach a perfectly talented person that they are a failure. Some people, of course, can overcome these criticisms, and become successful. Far more, I believe, believe the criticism, and give up, when, with a little encouragement, the world could have gained another talented whatever.
So that’s the downside of failure. Is there any upside? I suppose there are some people who should fail, but they will fail anyway. It seems to me that taking the opposite approach, and encouraging everyone, the so-called talentless as well as the so-called talented, is much more likely to keep people working at it, and will result in far more good work than identifying people as failures.
As others have said, some failures use failure to learn, and do something better. Everyone has failures of this kind. There’s a difference between screwing up, and failing. A failure is catastrophic, like the Columbia. A screw-up can be fixed. To be labeled a failure is disastrous for a person.
Encouragement does not mean withholding criticism. Everyone screws up. The issue is balancing the encouragement with the constructive criticism. That’s a different balance for every person, but, in my opinion, it is far better to err on the side of encouragement than it is on failure.
Once people have the idea that they are failures in their head, there is no rooting it out. No amount of success can root it out. You could be Jesus and still believe you are a failure. Personally, I think we should do anything we can to avoid turning people into failures. We lose far too much in the process. And if we coddle a few people who don’t deserve it—that’s a pretty small price to pay.
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