Why We All Need To Fail

Because of a combination of various factors, I have been thinking a lot lately about failure. I know that sounds like a rather depressing topic, but it has actually been a very positive experience for me. In fact, it has been so positive that I have been telling people on a regular basis for the past month or so that they should fail. I wish I had learned this lesson earlier on in life, but since the past is in the past, I’m doing the next best thing I know how to do and I’m letting everyone else know why we all need to fail.

The first (and really only) person who has ever told me that I should fail was my boss during my years as a college teaching assistant. She was, and is, one of my great heroes in life; but I still remember wondering exactly what she meant when she told all 40+ TAs that she wanted us to “fail and fail big” throughout the next school year. She went on to explain that the only way we were going to improve as TAs was if we tried new things and went above and beyond our past teaching experiences . . . and she knew that taking on that kind of a challenge meant we would probably fail in many of our attempts, and she was more than okay with that.

I immediately liked that perspective, but I had never been okay with failure before. As a result, it took me until just recently to fully accept that perspective and make it my own.

To explain how my perspective finally changed, I feel I should share a few of the moments in my life when I have felt like a complete failure. I do so in the hopes that my readers might find some commonalities between my experiences and their own.

1) Learning Spanish. I HATED my Spanish classes. Hated. Them. Looking back now I realize that that loathing may have stemmed from the fact that Spanish didn’t come to me as easily as most other subjects. In my mind I was a failure at Spanish because I couldn’t speak without a gringo accent. I was a failure because I couldn’t fully express myself. I was a failure because I couldn’t understand the Chileans when I first arrived to the mission field, (even after four solid years of studying the language in high school and college). I was a failure because I lost my personality in Spanish, I couldn’t teach in Spanish, I couldn’t tell stories in Spanish, and many times I got so lost in translation that I couldn’t even remember what I wanted to say in English. Failure. Failure. Failure.

2) Being a Missionary. If a returned missionary tells you that they never once (not even for a split second in their entire 18 or 24 months) felt like a failure on their mission, they are lying to you. The list of seeming failures in the life of a missionary could go on and on: You failed to get into a home. Your star investigators tell you your message is from the devil and you should never come back. You struggle with the language. You’re afraid to talk to people in the street. Your companion is mad at you or you’re mad at your companion. Investigators don’t come to church. You don’t have a baptism for a considerable amount of time, etc., etc. Failure. Failure. Failure.

3) Being a Grown-Up. After I graduated from college I couldn’t get a real job because I was moving out of the country in five months, so I lived at my parents house and got a job working a grand total of eight hours a week. Failure. When we got married and moved to Mexico, we lost our dream job and my visa was rejected. Failure. We bought a car that turned out to be a lemon. Failure. I made some bad travel decisions and had to spend the night at a Greyhound bus station . . . twice. Failure. At my current job I don’t always get my work done on time, I lose my patience with my students, and I’m not as organized as I know I could be. Failure.

So why did I just tell you all of that? Besides hoping my honesty about how many times I’ve failed in life helps me to identify with others’ experiences, I also shared those experiences to compare what I felt about myself and my failures then, to how I feel about them now (explanations to come).

Perhaps the biggest factor that has changed my perspective on failure is that I recently began offering free English classes at our church building. The curriculum that I am using is the same curriculum that they use in the MTC, so in much of my teacher training my mentor and I talked about the importance of getting students to speak from day one. As I have focused on this goal I have recognized in my students the same fear I once had when learning Spanish: the fear of failure. 

Some students are so afraid to try a new word or phrase because they know that they will say it wrong. Then, when they do give it a try and mispronounce a word or mix up the grammatical structure, they apologize so profusely you’d think they had committed a serious crime. So I have started telling my students to fail. I tell them that I want them to fail—that they have to fail—because if they are not failing it means they are not trying. After ten years of trying to master the Spanish language, I know that if they are not willing to fail, they will never learn English. True learning requires failure.

So how does this translate into real life? First of all, I want to highlight the difference between “failing” and “being a failure.” Many times, during those crazy months after arriving in Mexico when it seemed our life was one long chain of failures, Beto or I would say to the other, “I feel like a failure.” One night, after I had admitted that very thing, Beto looked at me and said, “There are a lot of times when I feel like a failure too. And then I remember the miracles God put in our lives to bring us together—and I think about how you are mine forever—and that’s how I know that I am not what I am feeling. I am not a failure.” We might have failed, but we were not failures. Along those lines, President Uchtdorf once stated:

Satan would rather that you define yourself by your [failures] instead of your divine potential. . . Don’t listen to him. We have all seen a toddler learn to walk. He takes a small step and totters. He falls. Do we scold such an attempt? Of course not. What father would punish a toddler for stumbling? We encourage, we applaud, and we praise because with every small step, the child is becoming more like his parents. . . . Compared to the perfection of God, we mortals are scarcely more than awkward faltering toddlers. . . . God understands that we get [to our eternal goal] not in an instant but by taking one step at a time. I do not believe in a God who would set up rules and commandments only to wait for us to fail so he could punish us. I believe in a Heavenly Father who is loving and caring and who rejoices in our every effort to stand tall and walk toward Him. (Four Titles)

God is not worried about our failures as much as He is worried about whether or not we get up after we fall. Society, on the other hand, is very worried about failure and makes us believe that the only acceptable outcome of our actions is perfection. God is focused on perfecting, and that process requires failure. As Brother Willcox so masterfully depicted in his analogy of the piano student, the student is not just presented with the options to either “be a concert pianist” or “never play the piano.” The student becomes a concert pianist over years of practice, and errors are expected in that learning process. 

So too, we are not left with the options to either be perfect or to be eternally condemned. Errors are expected in our learning process. Or, put a little differently, errors are  the learning process. We learn from opposition and often times that opposition comes from our failures, allowing us to juxtapose actions and consequences. Borrowing from the words of Adam and Eve, because of their failure their “eyes [were] opened, and in this life [they had] joy, . . . Were it not for [their failure they] never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of [their] redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient” (Moses 6:10-11). 

If I had given up on Spanish anywhere along my failure ridden path I never would have known just how well I can communicate in this beautiful language. I would have missed out on relationships with hundreds of incredible individuals, including my angel husband. I would have missed experiences of a lifetime that have had eternal consequences. I owe much of the events of the last five years of my life to the fact that I was willing to fail when it came to Spanish (even if I didn’t like it).

If I had given up the first time someone refused to listen to the message of the gospel on my mission, I never would have met the people I was sent to Chile to find. If I had refused to teach after the first time I totally slaughtered a lesson, I never would have learned to truly teach according to the Spirit and touch people’s lives. And if I had lost hope during the months and months without a baptism, I never would have had the chance to sit across from a very special daughter of God and testify to her that God loves her; and she most definitely would not have been baptized the last day of my mission.

Finally, if Beto and I had given up anywhere along our crazy journey . . . who knows. I used to think that if I failed at anything I would somehow compromise any possibilities for future success or opportunity . . . for the rest of my life. Life would somehow be over. It was silly of me to think like that. As President Uchtdorf puts it: “We can feel so burdened by our failures and shortcomings that we begin to think  we will never be able to succeed. We might even assume that because we have fallen before, falling is our destiny” (You Can Do It Now!) But it’s not!!!! As I look back at our crazy adventures this past year, there really wasn’t anything else for Beto and I to do but to keep going. Life didn’t end and, believe it or not, our failures brought us to a place with more opportunity than we could have imagined. We may have suffered quite a bit, but our entire future was definitely not jeopardized by the fact that life didn’t go exactly as planned.

So why do we all need to fail? To put it one way, we need to fail so that we can accomplish the things that truly matter. Anything that is worth our time and effort will come with the risk of failure. That risk and the consequences of our failure are the price of our eventual victory—and we will be victorious if we persevere. We cannot content ourselves at being perfect in mediocre goals that we know we can achieve; we need to push ourselves and risk failure in the pursuit of higher goals. Once our vision is on that higher goal, our lack of perfection becomes obsolete because we know we are participating in the process of perfecting who we are. And we know that that process requires failure. 

And that is why it is so important that Christ offered himself to be the Savior of the world, because We. Need. To. Fail. And HE is the reason we can fail and still achieve the highest goals of all. As President Uchtdorf explained, “Without the Atonement of Jesus Christ, life would be a dead-end road without hope or future. With the Atonement, life is an ennobling, inspiring journey of growth and development that leads to eternal life in the presence of our Heavenly Father” (Four Titles). May we all learn to love ourselves a little more as we embrace a positive perspective on failure and continually trust in Him who helps us overcome and triumph every time we fail.