Why Failure Matters

Albert Einstein famously noted that “Failure is success in progress.” He was clearly on to something there. Our society celebrates positivity and makes a fetish of success. But for creative work to succeed, we need to support an environment that encourages experimentation. And which recognises that failure is not only possible but desirable.

Only then can you push your creative boundaries.

This is not a recent insight. The 19th-century educational reformer John Dewey got the point, "Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes."

And avant-garde artists have always understood the need to challenge and reshape aesthetic traditions and formal conventions in a dialectical relationship with the original material and cultural setting.

Freedom to fail, freedom to learn

This embraces the need to take risks and recognises the intimate relationship that exists between failure and creativity. As the celebrated saxophonist Ornette Coleman, one of the founders of free jazz, put it: “It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.”

So, why does the recognition of this connection offer such fertile territory? A key factor is surely the opportunity to undermine accepted notions of common sense, which usually represent a stifling conformity. Unpick orthodox certainties of knowledge and agency. And probe the boundaries of good taste.

Bizarrely, in a classic example of how commerce commodifies culture, the work of novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett has been used in recent years to drive innovation in the tech sector. Silicon Valley start-ups are exhorted to ‘fail fast and fail often’. Real success, apparently, follows for those who treat failure simply as a waymark on the route to undreamed-of riches.

The mantra is based on Beckett’s famous and often misunderstood line, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It’s taken from the short story Worstward Ho. His work is often regarded as both difficult and unremittingly bleak. But there’s a strand of black humour that runs through it which offers a way through the darkness. And the title is a punning reference to Charles Kingsley’s historical novel Westward Ho! – a celebration of British exceptionalism and imperialism.

You only fail if you stop trying

Needless to say, in Worstward Ho Beckett was meditating on something far more profound than how to succeed in business. The fragmented story is about how we engage with the dim void that is our world. The struggle to establish meaning in the face of cosmic indifference. The existential difficulty of communication. The all too human reality of indecision.

But it concludes with the instruction, “Said nohow on.” This is a typical Beckettian imperative. We must go on even when it seems impossible to do so.

Beckett understood the contradictions that characterise existence. And the deeper understanding of its complexities that can flow from an acceptance of the revelatory potential of failure. Mistakes can act as conduits to new perspectives.

In a world heading for the abyss as modernity's empty promises of progress are plain for all to see, his life-long struggle to develop new forms of drama and fiction provides us with important insights into both the artistic process and how it can inform our understanding of the human condition.

There is a dynamic relationship between failure and creative success. We continually make and re-make ourselves to develop new realities. Learning from what doesn't work to help build something that does.

As another jazz musician Miles Davis said: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”