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.
Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2020
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.
