James Dyson was in the news this week saying Brexit has given him ‘freedom’ (insert rolling eyes) which prompted a friend of mine to write a post asking some unanswered, tough questions from a legal perspective. As I tend to do when I read something I don’t know much about, I then went to Wikipedia to read more on the topic. Aside from his stance on Brexit, one of the most interesting takeaways for me was an excerpt from an interview he did with Fast Company in May 2007 where he asserted the importance of failure in life:
I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.
It reminded me of another great quote attributed to Michael Jordan:
I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
Earlier this month I was responsible to host our regular Struggle Well meeting which we’ve been doing on Zoom and funnily enough I chose to discuss failure. This was days before I read Mr. Dyson’s quote so I suppose it’s be on my mind a lot lately.
Inspired by a podcast I’ve listened to I thought we could address 2 / 3 past mistakes or things that haven’t gone right. This is to try to understand why that may have been as well as what lessons we’ve learnt from them. In the process hopefully we can come up with more ways of ‘struggling well’ or ’succeeding better’ as they say on the show.
I think the importance of embracing failure cannot be understated. Not doing so has definitely shackled me in life and I’ve tried and continue to change as I’ve gotten older.
My Excerpts 