Ralph Heath on celebrating failure

In Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes, and Thinking Big published by Career Press (2009), Ralph Heath explains how the power of taking bold but carefully calculated risks and making mistakes while pursuing what Jim Collins characterizes as BHAGs (i.e. Big Hairy Audacious Goals) can achieve success of a magnitude and value that would otherwise be impossible. Heath really does not advocate celebrating failure per se; rather, he advocates celebrating the process by which to leverage failure as a means by which to succeed.

He clearly disagrees with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson who, in Rework, assert that “learning from mistakes is overrated.” Moreover, “Failure is not a prerequisite for success…People who have failed before have the same amount of success as people who have never tried at all….Success is the experience that actually counts.”

Consider this statement by the late Bill Walsh, American Football Hall of Fame coach of Stanford University and NFL Hall of Fame coach of the San Francisco 49ers. I also highly recommend his book, The Score Takes Care of Itself.

“When you are determined to use failure as a school for success, you’ll find that it’s easier to hold a strategic course and refine the plan, rather than constantly second-guessing yourself. Panic subsides, along with depression, humiliation, and all the other unhappy byproducts of perceiving failure as an unmitigated disaster.” The phrase “failure as a school for success” indicates what, in fact, Heath proposes to celebrate: appreciation of the lessons to be learned from failure that will guide and inform the journey to ultimate success. That is precisely what Thomas Edison had in mind when correcting a research colleague who had been frustrated saddened another “failure” in the laboratory: “That’s not a failure. It’s a very valuable development because it provides additional evidence of what won’t work.”

Edison also observed that “vision without execution is hallucination” and Heath clearly agrees with him because the most productive “students” who use failure “as a school for success” are results-driven.

My own opinion is that we can learn valuable lessons from both success and failure (however defined) but are then obligated to leverage those lessons by applying them effectively.

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