The Right to FailIn our society, failure is a bad thing.
In our society, failure is a bad thing.
If you fail in school, you get kicked out. If you fail at work, you get fired. If you fail on the soccer field, the coach takes you out.
Failing is bad.
Right?
Or do we all, inherently, have a right to do wrong? Do we have a natural right to be able to try and fail at something? Is that how we learn?
I think the answer is yes and no, but more yes than you may originally have thought.
In our society, we psychologically deter failure. We do our best to make sure no one fails, ever.
Of course, tons of people do poorly on tons of things. It is natural selection at work.
I think, however, that we all have a right to mess up. No matter who we are, we have the right available to us that we can learn by failing. We can learn by experimenting.
We can try things and if they go wrong we can try new things.
That right is very important. When we live in a society where everyone tells us what we should and should not be doing — we lose the ability to learn to do wrong.
Sometimes, in fact, very often, you learn 10x more by trying something on your own. It is worth it.
Originally published at gonen.blog.
By jordangonen on June 2, 2017.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.