Tag Archives: failure

A quick life lesson

“If I couldn’t handle not being good at something, then how can I consider myself a successful person?” ~ Gerald Hodges

Watch this story about a young man who picked a sport that was the most challenging one he could choose, to prove to himself that he can find success when challenged.

https://fb.watch/bROEBEZ6cB/

Even if he didn’t get his team to qualify for the state championships, which he did, this is the kind of attitude I want to see in my kids and the kids in my school.

If at first you don’t succeed

As the saying goes:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again!”

Working with students, what you sometimes see is:

“If at first you don’t succeed… quit before someone sees you fail.” Or, “If at first you don’t succeed… avoid trying altogether.”

What the saying should say:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, something different.” (Try a different approach, don’t just try the same thing over again in the same way.)

When things aren’t working, students seem to have two main gears: keep moving forward, because curiosity points to getting unstuck. Or ‘Park’ because it’s not worth the effort or embarrassment.

Teaching students that effort matters more than results or that a failing result can still be a learning opportunity, is to teach them to be resilient and to persevere. This doesn’t mean everyone gets a participation badge, this isn’t just about another quote, “If you did your best, that’s all that really matters.”

No, this is about creating an environment where students aren’t afraid to bite off more than they can chew… to be so ambitious about their goals that a failure to achieve them still puts students much farther than if they had set the bar too low and succeeded.

This is about creating opportunities for students to do something epic, rather than just something every other kid is doing, with a sample you share of the expected result… a cookie cutter task where students produce the same round cookies, but get to decide where the pretty sprinkles go to make their cookie look a little different than everyone else’s.

If you want students to really succeed, well then they have to start a task with the real potential for failure. They have to struggle with uncertainty of success. They have to learn that not reaching a perfectly successful goal can be an opportunity to learn more and different things. Because without authentic struggle, learning is shallow and fleeting.

“If at first you do succeed… the task probably wasn’t hard enough to truly learn something new.”

Iterate doesn’t just mean “do it again”

I’ve written a fair bit about Learning and Failure. One of the things that turns a failure into learning is not giving up and iterating. But I’m not sure that’s the correct term? To iterate is ‘to perform or utter repeatedly’, but that’s not really what I mean. The general point of iteration when you meet a roadblock, or fail in an attempt, is not to try to perform the same task or procedure in the same way, but rather to attempt a different version of the same thing.

It’s not just about applying the same process over and over again, but rather it’s about recognizing what caused the failure and attempting to circumvent it, trying to achieve results by trying something untried, unique, or divergent from the failed attempt. This is what can transform a failed attempt into a success. Core to this idea is not seeing a failure as a failure, but rather as an invitation to learn by trying again. It’s not a failure until you give up.

But sometimes you don’t get another attempt. The question is why not? Did you run out of time? Do you lack the resources, support, or effort? Is it a high pressure test that you can only do once?

Ran out of time? Ask: What would your next step be if you had time? What did you learn along the way? Who is an expert you can follow up with to help you understand what went wrong? You can learn by reflection as well as by repeated attempts.

Lack resources or support? Who can help? What do you really need versus what would be nice to have? Who is an expert you can follow up with to help you understand what went wrong?

Lack of effort? Whose fault is that? What help do you need? What are you willing to do to move forward? What’s stopping you?

Is it a high pressure test that you only get one attempt on? This is often a fallacy. This is often more arbitrary than you think. The reality is that most tests that really matter can be done again, just not in the timeline you hoped for. Tests like the LSAT are high stakes, but many people attempt it more than once. To me it’s interesting to see so many teachers not give students second chances on tests? Why? If a student is willing to put more effort in and actually learn the content, why not give them another try? Is the mark on the first attempt the important thing or is the understanding of the content more important?

That said, to iterate doesn’t just mean ‘do it again’. What makes the second (or third or fourth) attempt different? What new information, effort, or resources are available? What other ways can learning be demonstrated? What else can be done to show learning, to achieve learning, to discover learning that wasn’t done before?

Iterate, don’t repeat failure. Don’t do the same thing over again and expect the same result.

Obstacles become the way

When I wrote Learning and Failure I struggled with the word failure. Setbacks and obstacles that some see as failures can often become the impetus for far greater learning than if the roadblock never needed to be faced.

Here is the end of the post:

“The learning potential of failure is significant. If the work is meaningful enough, there can be more learned from an epic failure, than a marginal success, where the measure for success was set too low.”

One of our students at Inquiry Hub is working on developing an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can listen to a song and determine the key of that song. The workings of this are far beyond my understanding, but in his reflection about his learning so far, (after doing a great job explaining the process), he shared this in his ‘Log of Milestones’:

– Made a python script to automatically take a mp3 file, and find its music key by making a query to Tunebat. I got blocked by Tunebat, because they identified my automated queries as an “attack” on their server.

– Wrote a Firefox web extension using javascript to make the queries to Tunebat not seem automated, and therefore not rejected. Managed to work.

And then later:

– I found there was a way on Python to fake a web request to Tunebat without getting blocked.

I love seeing this creativity and resiliency. The obstacle becomes the way. He sends hundreds of automated requests to a website, essential to give him the large amounts of data he needs to train his AI; the website sees these automated requests as an attack on their server (this is known as a DOS attack); So he writes first a web browser extension, then later a python program, that tricks the website into answering his thousands of requests without seeing them as an attack.

The roadblock or failure isn’t a failure, it’s an opportunity to adapt, be creative, and learn new skills.

F ailure

A lways

I nvites

L earning

The invitation is always there, the opportunity to overcome can become the place where amazing learning happens. A potential failure can become the impetus to build resilience and to create new and unforeseen challenges to overcome. It can become the thing that makes the learning experience a worthy experience to remember… more memorable than the easy ‘A’ on a cookie-cutter style learning experience where the outcome is uniform for all the students who jump through the same hoops to get that ‘A’.

The obstacle can be the failure point where people give up, or it can be the opportunity to overcome. The learning invitation is there, as long as the drive, resilience, and effort are there to push a student.

Sure in this example he might not have been able to fool the website, and maybe his efforts could have come up short, but I don’t think that would have stopped him anyway. His attempts at a workaround could still have provided a lot of learning that he never would have had otherwise. The obstacle became the way, and while the positive outcome this time was rewarding, so too could have been a so-called ‘failure’. There is nothing artificial about this kind of learning.

Failure is a frame of mind, not an outcome

I’ve written a lot about learning and failure. In a post titled, Learning Through Failure vs Failing to Learn, I said,

“When we talk about learning from failure, we are not actually talking about failure, we are talking about perseverance, and resilience, and tenacity. We are talking about coming up to resistance and unplanned outcomes and working through them to achieve a goal. We are talking about students learning significantly more than if everything went their way.“

Listening to many students at Inquiry Hub, you hear them talk about this in an amazing way. They share the very ethos behind this idea:

For anyone that didn’t bother to watch these two short clips, here is what Thia said in the second one,

“Inquiry projects aren’t about always being successful. It’s about trying something new, learning new skills, creating something. It isn’t always about being the best at it, or succeeding in it. You might have a failed inquiry, and that’s completely ok. It doesn’t always have to be a success for it to be a good quality project. It’s all about the process.”

What’s interesting is that if you don’t understand this idea, it sounds like accepting failure is ‘OK’. If you don’t recognize that students are talking about putting themselves ‘out there’ and trying something beyond their comfort zone, then it sounds like they are giving themselves a participation badge for just showing up. But if you truly understand and embrace the idea of learning through failure, you aren’t talking about failure at all.

Elon Musk just had a rocket explode upon landing and called it a success because of the data they collected.


I’m sure there are people who get this. I’m also sure there are people who laugh, “Ha, you call that a success? What a loser.”

A real loser is one who doesn’t try. A real loser is one who gets an outcome they don’t want and quits. A real loser is someone that makes excuses rather than steps up to make things right.

People who do epic things, and people who try epic things and don’t succeed, understand that failure is a frame of mind, not an outcome. They understand that learning is a journey, not a destination.

Voice and choice

This was my Facebook memory from 3 years ago:

Spent well over 15hrs at work today and came home totally pumped! Students rocked their presentations at our open house tonight.

The whole event exceeded my expectations, starting with about 240 people coming (more than I had reservations or seats for), and ending with students interviewing each other with questions from the audience.

It is simply amazing what student’s can do when they are given voice & choice, and they are provided with time to explore their passions and publicly share them.

Congratulations to our Inquiry Hub students, you were amazing school ambassadors today!

I’ve been thinking and writing about giving students choice, voice, and an authentic audience for over a decade now. And, I’ll always remember this night as the night I really saw it fully come to life.

Everything about this open house went amazing. The only challenges where parking, and adding more seats to the gym. The students did 90% of the planning and executed a seamless event with perfect sound and incredible presentations that opened people’s eyes to what’s possible when students feel empowered in a school.

The best part of the night was watching students interviewing students about their inquiry projects. Our students got to share what kinds of projects they do, designed by them, to follow their passions and interests as part of their school day. This is the real strength of what we do at Inquiry Hub.

There are students just like ours in every school. The difference is, in many other schools, students spend their days following a pattern of going class to class and doing what the teacher tells them to do. Yes, some of those things teachers ask them to do are amazing. But students seldom get a part of their day to choose what they want to work on. Students seldom get to design their own learning on a topic of their choice.

What we’ve learned as educators at Inquiry Hub is that to do this, students need scaffolding and support, working on progressively bigger projects. Students need assistance with time management and being self directed. And students need to try, fail, learn, and grow.

Whenever I hear a senior student at Inquiry Hub talk about their projects, they talk about being fearless learners who aren’t afraid to fail along the way. They will often do this while telling a story about something others would consider a huge success, but to them there was still more to do, or aspects of the project not yet achieved. This resilience only comes when students feel they have voice and choice in their learning, and this open house three years ago told me that we were finally achieving the kind of student empowerment we were hoping to achieve when we started the school.

Future Success

Future success comes from the habit of pushing yourself beyond what you can do today. I can have goals, and I can make plans, and I can talk about what I want to do. I can ‘do’ all of these things, but it is actions and effort that make the difference.

Here I am failing to do handstand push-ups against the wall.


I scraped some skin off me knee on that last fall. However, that last fall came after 3 successful reps. That’s 3 more than I did on the first set. I’m getting there. That doesn’t mean the failures feel good. That doesn’t mean the next 3 will feel easy… yet. I have a lot of hard work and effort to get there.

Six weeks ago, if you told me that I could do something like this, I would have ‘No, waaay too hard!’:


But that’s only 32 days after trying to do just this:


After sharing my fail video above, Kelly Christopherson tweeted:


The reality is that Kelly and Jonathan Sclater have been inspiring me as well. We are sharing our efforts publicly and push each other: To keep improving; To appreciate effort and hard work; and, To recognize our incremental improvements;

My future includes being able to do a 30 second, unassisted handstand. I failed at reaching this goal on my original two timelines. My next timeline is aggressive and I might not make that either. But it will happen. The journey will include more failures, and false starts, and frustration.

I started by saying, ‘Future success comes from the habit of pushing yourself beyond what you can do today.’ If I’m going to push myself beyond my comfort zone, I’m going to reach failure points. But last months failed attempts got me where I am now, and tomorrow’s failures will bring me future success.

The tech won’t always work… and that’s ok.

I’ve been ‘playing’ with digital learning and technology for a while now. My first blog post was in 2006 and my first podcast was in 2012. It’s Sunday night and I published a podcast over an hour ago. It usually takes a while to get onto iTunes, because first it has to go to a podcast hosting site called Blubrry. I did this a week and a half ago, and it went to Blubrry and then to iTunes pretty quickly. But tonight the new podcast won’t move to that first step, and I have no idea why? Even after I ‘ping‘ the website, (even though that should happen automatically), my post won’t go to Blubrry. That’s the frustrating thing, I don’t think I did anything different but somehow it won’t work. It might need time, and everything will be fine in the morning by the time this is published. It might not and I’ll have a whole lot of troubleshooting to do.

I do podcasts for fun. I do podcasts to learn. I’ll learn from this, but right now it doesn’t feel like fun.

Educators, as you head into the new world of ‘remote learning’, while we cope with social distancing, empty schools, and COVID-19 continuing to keep us physically separate, please realize that the technology doesn’t always work as planned. It doesn’t always work for the neophytes, and it doesn’t always work for the people like me that think they know what they are doing. When you get frustrated, and you will, remember this: Remember a time when you were really excited to teach a lesson. You stayed up late figuring things out and setting up the handouts for kids. Then you got to school and the photocopier jams horribly. You have no time to get your printing done. Dang! Your whole plan is done and needs reworking. At that point, you didn’t say to yourself, “That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again!” That would be silly.

You’ll try using some technology for the first time and it won’t go as planned. You’ll try doing a video conferencing lesson and it will flop. You’ll have students doing things you didn’t expect them to do. And you’ll work it out. You’ll connect with your students. You’ll laugh at yourself and they’ll laugh too. You’ll get a lesson or two from a student that knows more than you. And soon, you’ll feel much better about the technology and the strategies you are using.

Oh, and even then, there will be times when the technology doesn’t work… and that’s ok.

It’s not a failure if it leads to success

I love this video:

It reminds me that the path to success isn’t always easy, and failure isn’t failure when it leads to success.

On a personal note, I started a 30 Day Challenge to do a 30 second freestanding handstand.

Progress until last night was pretty good:

https://twitter.com/datruss/status/1243331006767210497

https://twitter.com/datruss/status/1245227496930340864

But last night didn’t go as well as I hoped:

But here’s the thing, I’m pushing myself pretty hard. Also, I just want to handstand for 30 seconds but I’m actually doing the training to walk on my hands. On top of that, I’m trying to do a 5 step plan in 30 days, and 1/3 the way through I’m on step 3.

I need to slow down. The videos show me that my core is a weak spot. My shoulder no longer hurts, but it isn’t fully recovered from an injury. I’m going to hit my goal if I’m smart, and don’t rush, and if I do every step really well before moving on. Back to step 2 I go.

Meanwhile at work, I see similar things happening. With Covid-19 shutting down schools, we have educators scrambling to figure out how to teach students online and from a distance. All around me I see teachers trying to do too much, too fast, and getting frustrated. I shared this on Twitter recently:

When everything is so new and so challenging, mistakes will be made. Those mistakes will not be seen as failures in the long run if we learn, grow, and improve ourselves along the way.

Fear can paralyze

Imagine being legally blind, able only to see shadows in your peripheral vision. Now imagine needing to endure 10 rounds of fighting a new fresh black belt fighter, for consecutive 3 minutes rounds, to earn your black belt… Richard Turner did this. However I didn’t learn about Richard through his martial arts skills, but rather from his skills as a card mechanic… a close up card magician.

Here is where I first saw him, on Penn & Teller’s show ‘Fool Us’, where top notch magicians try to earn a performance spot in Penn & Teller’s live Vegas show. How do they earn this spot? They must do a trick that confounds Penn & Teller, and they are hard to fool!

Richard fooled them faster than anyone, and Teller was motioning to give him the trophy before he finished his trick.

I recently listened to Richard Turner — The Magical Phenom Who Will Blow Your Mind (#411) on the Tim Ferriss Podcast

Here is what Richard said at about the 1hr, 13min mark of the podcast (including opening commercials). I’m not adding anything beyond this quote, it’s brilliant and stands on its own!

“Fear can paralyze. We can be so worried about doing the wrong thing, that we do nothing.
There’s actually an English proverb that says, ‘A man who is afraid to make a mistake is unlikely to make anything… Fear of failure, when left unchecked, can actually lead to the failure we fear.” ~ Richard Turner