Sometimes the system breaks. Today was one of those sometimes.
“The morning starts the day before” was the quote dropped by my friend Phil as I told him about my bad start to the day. Instead of bounding out of bed, I hit the “shut up you stupid alarm” button on the alarm clock and rolled over. Only to awake 10 minutes after I was meant to be at the first meeting of the day. This was a failure.
I was chatting with a group of 16 year olds today and the concept of “the oral speech” popped up. (For starters, what other kind of speech is there?) One guy had an assignment due tomorrow and all he had done was written it, he went on to say that his teacher won’t be impressed with his work, for he hadn’t prepared any cue cards. “Cue cards?!”, I replied “if you rocked up with que cards I’d probably fail you before you started”*. But another student was shocked at the idea of not having the guiding comfort of a cue cards, and expressed her horror at my comment. I went on to say “who uses cue cards in great TED talks?”
“But we aren’t professionals” was the response from the group.
I have a feeling the real issue underlying this was “we are afraid to look silly and fail”.
I heard another story today of a guy who’s left the business venture that he co-created with some others just under 6 months ago. He expressed his feeling of failure. I questioned him on how he was measuring his success or failure. At the end of the day he traded time & money for a learning opportunity. Which sounds an awful lot to me what thousands of university students do each day. Sure he didn’t come out as the next Mark Zuckerberg, but few do.
In the 2009 movie of Star Trek Kirk cheats I. commander Spocks Kobayashi Maru simulation, as Spock has designed it to show that sometimes the only way is failure.
Out of all these ideas around “failures”, it seems that the only real failure is my inability to be disciplined enough to get enough sleep. Students are unfortunately living in a space where they have to be instantly amazing at the task at hand, and don’t have the freedom to try new things and “fail” in the process. Business foke who go out on a limb, risk a little bit of money to try something new, if it doesn’t work out, but you learnt something in the process, it’s not a failure, it a learning experience.
If I could work out how to do it, I would design an assignment for students that the only way to succeed at the assignment is to break down the barriers created by other well meaning people and force the student to failure, multiple times, but through the process learn, and continue to learn how to learn, experiment & think creatively and ultimately come up on top of all the others who are too afraid to fail. Unlike Spocks simulation where the designed outcome is failure, this would have a designed outcome of success, but not in a typical linear fashion.
I hope that I have the courage to go out on a limb, take a chance & fail every once in a while.
*in hindsight that language was a little too emotive.
I think I’ll put a disclaimer on this blog alon the lines of “Most of these blog posts reflexes Andrew’s thoughts at the end of a long day. In hindsight, he only ever agrees with about 90% of what he has written/said. If any material offends you, sorry, but that’s too bad, but in retrospect and growth, some of it will offend the author, and that is ok.”