The Success of Failure
I’ve blogged before about the success of failure and how critical it is to improving in whatever domain you are working in. In my review of Matthew Syed’s Bounce I noted the central importance of purposeful practice. That is, practicing at the “edge” which inevitably leads to failure. Without failure you don’t know where (and how) to improve. Failure is vital to success.
Donald Clark provides a nice succinct list to the 5 levels of failure. Read it - it’s good. So, in abbreviated form:
1. Failure is normal in life, it happens, recognise it for what it is.
2. Break it down (or the science of marginal gains). Break your task down in to small steps or elements, strip it back, analyse it and improve. For those in the teaching game, Lesson Study looks at these building blocks in the classroom.
3. Practice, then practice some more! Do it, fail, feedback, improve, stretch your abilities.
4. Catastrophic Failure: practice those tasks that lead to major failure… so that they are unlikely to happen when it’s the real deal!
5. Reboot: learn, try, fail, go back to the beginning of the level and try again. Its a gaming strategy and incredibly frustrating, additive and the way to accelerated learning!!
So, go ahead, fail and go do it again.
Anyone have any good (big or small) failure stories?