‘Everyday’ Intelligence: Learn How to Fail

No- one likes failing. Well except for my high school chemistry teacher. He LOVED failing people.

In fact, he was once examining a friend of mine and went as far as saying:

‘Bravo, my dear boy, I see that you’ve finally mastered those definitions and equations; I am quite proud of you. You can sit down now; your mark for today is an

‘F’

At the time, of course, everyone found the above quite hilarious; even the chap who got the actual ‘F’. In time, however, he grew to hate chemistry to an extent that he did not even show up to classes anymore.

That naturally meant that he kept failing the class over and over again; that was because he did not know how to fail properly.

Initially, he let his failures take control of his thought process and, thus, subconsciously, he refused to see them as such. Rather, he managed to convince himself that chemistry was just not his ‘thing’ and that he would never be good at it.

A year had passed, however, and he was getting quite fed up with failing all the time. In the end, he swallowed his pride and asked a couple of people (including myself) to help him out with his studies.

We didn’t show him how to study; we didn’t do his problems for him; Hell, we didn’t even TRY and tell him what to do. How so, you might ask?

Well, it was because he came to us and asked us:

‘What am I doing wrong?’

At that point we let him tell us a bit more about his way of studying and established that it had a single, but quite significant flaw- he tended to learn things he could not understand off by heart, without putting any thought in it.

Having told him that, he said that, in the future, he would ask people to explain those to him and would refrain from learning them off by heart.

Naturally, the above story had a happy ending (it being American and all…) - my friend passed his chemistry exams. Not with flying colours, mid you, but he did.

And he could not have done it without failing first.

And here’s why:

• It reminds you that you are not perfect and that you can sometimes make mistakes. Thus, it is really important to objectively look at the REASONS for your failure so that those mistakes can be averted in the future.
• It builds up character and develops creativity. If seen as a challenge, failure can inspire you to look for solutions that you have thought never existed.
• It shows you how difficult and challenging life can be but it also makes you feel alive and human as it shows you that there are still things out there that you cannot YET tackle or deal with.
• It gives you some time to think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. In most cases, it helps you find a reason for indulging in activities that you once saw pointless.
• It shows you who you are and makes you think about who you want to be and how you want to get there.

Again, not cliché; just very simple points that we tend to constantly ignore.

In the light of the above, just ask yourselves: what would have happened if, say, banks admitted that they were wrong and analyzed their mistakes every so often?

Wouldn’t their ‘flawless’ policies and ‘immaculate’ strategies have been re- thought and remodelled?

Would we have experienced this so- called ‘credit crunch’?

No; probably not.

Maybe strawberry or chocolate crunch- THAT we would’ve loved.