In Defense of Trying: Why Failure Is Valuable

Giving ourselves permission to be imperfect, and to move on, allows us to sample more of what life has to offer.

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Trying gets a bad rap. The prevailing social judgment against trying is summed up in the quote from Yoda during The Empire Strikes Back in which the Jedi Master tells Luke, “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try” (Lucasfilm Ltd., n.d.). Not only am I unable to see the wisdom in these words, but they carry a connotation that I find counterproductive, or even downright harmful: that failure is not okay.

The importance of failure

Failure is not just okay, it’s necessary for our growth. For one thing, history demonstrates that people who attempt the monumental are met with failure time and again. Thomas Edison, Sojourner Truth, Gandhi, and many others have offered inspiring accounts of the role of defeat and failure in their developmental journeys. In our own time, President Obama, for example, has discussed how he was shaped by the difficulty he experienced as a young man both finding and keeping a job (e.g. Kovaleski, 2008). Michael Jordan stated, “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” (Zorn, 2018).

The stories of these and other influential people show us that failure is not only valuable as the means to the end of success, as Michael Jordan points out, but often failure is valuable in and of itself. It is an opportunity for learning, growth, and finding meaning in our struggles. One of the best fictionalized accounts of this truth can be found in the movie Rocky.

Many people forget that in the original film, Rocky loses at the end. We forget that because his failure feels like a victory. His failure demonstrated to him who he truly was and solidified the value of the relationships in his life. The fact that he tried was what defined him. We should all be so fortunate to experience such a loss.

But it’s not just the monumental loss that intimidates us. I’ve come to see that often times our fear of failure pushes us away from attempts even at the mundane. While going through graduate school, one of the ways I supported myself was by substitute teaching in grades K-12. I remember I was teaching a first-grade class around Thanksgiving and the lesson called for the class to make turkeys out of construction paper by tracing their hands. Even after a demonstration and repeated encouragement, the class just sat there because no child wanted to be the first to try. Even at this young age, they internalized the message that not trying was preferable to failure.

In my own life, I can think of many examples but one from junior high stands out. A teacher at my school berated me for discontinuing band. I had tried it, and not stuck with it, which she said, reflected poorly on my character. She called me a quitter. She didn’t take into consideration that my single mom could no longer afford the instrument rental, or that band practices were before school when I had to deliver newspapers in order to make ends meet. From my teacher’s privileged vantage point, merely trying band was a moral failure on my part. For me, I am grateful that I had the opportunity to experience it even for a while.

In my years of teaching graduate school and practicing therapy, I’ve seen the impact of this destructive message over and over. Clients avoid taking up a new hobby because they feel they have to commit to it long-term as well as excel. Students are gripped with anxiety at small group exercises unless they are told exactly what to say and do. We’ve been conditioned that missing out on life experiences is preferable to looking foolish or being perceived as a quitter.

This is one of the ways in which the growth mindset theory perpetuates maladaptive traits. We should feel emboldened to try and at the same time empowered to let go. We can’t ever find ourselves without permission to search in every nook and cranny life has to offer.