Willingness to fail

[Woldere]

Not as much as you.

no u

yes you

[Boleslav]

I think that "willingness to fail" makes it sound almost as though one is aiming for failure. I do know what you are getting at here though Japanpimp, an ability to reflect on what was successful and what wasn't is a vital skill for life.

[Wildor]

There is something highly romantic to this "Noble Failure" concept. Very attractive! And adolescent fiction is often replete with examples of it. So is mature fiction. And so is history!


Scott of the Antartic, General Robert E. Lee for the way he brilliantly fought for years in a lost cause, even Mikhail Gorbatchev for failing to keep the ship of state afloat while trying to do better for his people (just an example here folks).

My point is that such a concept is pretty much universal.

[GarytheBanana]

I think I remember once a quote from someone extremely successful saying "if you try as hard as you can to succeed, you will fail 90% of the time. But the 10% that you actually do succeed at is all that matters."

[Kaminarii]

If you think of Thomas Edison, he created the light bulb, but it took him over a thousand times, if he had not been willing fail over and over, where would the world be today.

[abracax]

If you think of Thomas Edison, he created the light bulb, but it took him over a thousand times, if he had not been willing fail over and over, where would the world be today.

Without failure how would we learn to succeed?

[SunTzu123]

that quote was made by the weak to make the losers feel good

[japanpimp]

Not as much as you.

There is a tradition in Japanese literature of the noble failure or the nobility of failure. To the western mind it can be a difficult concept to grasp. If you are interested in learning a bit more about this Japanese tradition I would suggest reading this article as a starting point.

http://www.gotterdammerung.org/books...f-failure.html

To the western mind, winning can be everything and losers are to be ridiculed but if we are honest about it, quite often it is only when we fail and how we cope with that, that we really learn more about ourselves and what we need to change to succeed. Those who have never failed have never truly been tested to the extreme and those who choose to avoid risk and choose the easy path through life may never learn what they are truly capable of.

Many millionaires tell stories about how their first business failed and they lost everything. It was only through learning the lessons those failures had to teach them that they were able to go on to become the great successes that they eventually did. Risk takers are willing to admit the possibility of failure. Yet they will still continue to take risks and accept the losses when they occur because they know that when they do succeed, that success will be a result of all the accumulated attempts that they have made and will be so much sweeter.

If you cannot understand this kind of attitude then you are probably risk averse and have chosen to live a life of small risk/small reward. There is nothing wrong with that and indeed a large percentage of our populations choose to live this way. They are the backbone of our societies and without them our societies might fail to function.

But we need the risk takers to do what they do because when they succeed our whole society advances. They are the innovators and entrepreneurs that push the boundaries for all of us.

Well said. I agree.