PART 2: How to Turn Setbacks Into Successes

PART TWO:

Very recently I discovered TED talks. This is a brilliant free resource. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design. These conferences or public lectures are held in America and Europe and feature many geniuses. You should jump on the TED website and start looking at all the great thinkers who have given TED talks. We are talking Bill Gates, Bono and even Nobel Prize winners. I love writing these blogs for you so I can share the wonderful resources I find that enrich and motivate me. There are more than 2,900 talks on this website, and so far everyone I watched has been brilliant and inspiring. You could begin by just watching the most popular TED talks.

After I watched a brilliant lecture from the director of Google X, Astro (Eric) Teller I watched another talk from economist Tim Harford.

https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford

Both Harford and Teller looked at how we should react to failure. Our society celebrates success, but the truth is that success and failure are intrinsically linked. You cannot have one without the other! It is unlikely you are going to succeed scientifically, artistically or in business unless you first get at least a couple of failures under your belt. And the great stars of history testify to this. As Malcolm Forbes said, “Failure is success if we learn from it”. Thomas A Edison put it his way, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. Every failure brings you one step closer to cracking a solution!

Dr Archie Cochrane’s theory on randomised trials

Back to this brilliant talk I saw from economist Tim Harford. He spoke about Scottish doctor, Archie Cochrane, who spent many years in a prisoner of war camp. He was perplexed by an ailment the prisoners of war suffered from. They were weak, sick and had skin sores. He conducted experiments with the little supplies he had and eventually discovered that marmite (a cousin of vegemite) cured the men. When he returned to the United Kingdom he lobbied for more randomized control trials to advance medicine. He said trial and error was the only way to advance medicine. Note that error equals failure. He said that to make progress you had to be brave, get out there, have a go and more often than not fail, before you succeed. Cochrane’s book was called Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services.

Sometimes I think our attitude to failure needs to shift. Instead of being hungry for success we should be hungry for failure, because failure is the journey to success. We should proudly tell our friends and families about our disasters personally and professionally. Teenagers should go home and say to their parents, “I attempted an ambitious science experiment and it blew up in my face.” The parent should applaud their kid’s bravery, and then encourage them to do some more research about the experiment online. They should never respond, “Oh, no, why did you do that!”

Economist Tim Harford says every complex successful system, in economics, science and art, evolved through trial and error. Even nature has a system of trial and error called evolution.

Are there correct answers to life’s problems?

Hartford believes our education system is failing to teach children the value of failure. He says as school we are all taught a long list of problems with correct answers. For example we are taught maths, which has only correct answers and spelling, which demands correct answers, but Hartford wants more art and philosophy taught in school. He says children need to learn at a young age thatt the world is a complex place and that there are often no right answers, only workable options.

Hartford says the world is run by people who have a God complex. They have an indefatigable belief that they are right, but most of the time they are as lost as the rest of us. But again our society demands that our leaders are ‘successful’ and not open to failing.

Abandon the God complex

Hartford says it’s time we stopped adoring success and started applauding failure. He wants to see politicians stand up and say, “Yes, I want to fix the health system. I want to fix the education system, but I really don’t know how to do this. I have half a dozen ideas. I plan on trying them out. They will probably all fail then I’ll go to my next six ideas. By then one or two ideas might be showing promise, so I’ll cancel all the trials that aren’t working and we’ll build on the two ideas that show promise and eventually we will make progress!!!”

Would you have the courage to vote for a politician who is this honest and admits he or she doesn’t have the answers but is prepared to try and FAIL, or would you vote for the politician who presents him or herself as a success story? It feels so much more comfortable to put our faith in someone who always appears to be right, but let’s face it, the current system is not serving us well. We seem to have a lot of politicians who claimed to have the answers but are leading us nowhere.

Are you prepared to shift your definition of success?

Is success about someone who has only achieved or is success about someone who failed, persevered, failed some more and then finally got it right. Hartford put it this way – it is okay to make mistakes, because if we know who we are and what we want then our mistakes are in a good direction, they are good mistakes. Ultimately these mistakes help clarify our vision and they will lead us to that crucial breakthrough. They will help us come up with the winning formula. I like what Winston Churchill said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”