My Tao - Stories of Failure

Stories of success are interesting and sometimes useful in that success can be emulated. However, stories of failure are even better, because success can be due to luck while failure is more usually due to something inevitable. Weakness in ourselves and the world around us are often revealed through our failures.

Furthermore, success is often due entirely to an ability to avoid blunders. An awareness of our own weaknesses as well as weaknesses in society as a whole is more often than not the key ingredient to success. One way to improve our own lives is therefore through an openness about our failures. At the very least, we must be open about them towards ourselves, because if we constantly seek to avoid memories of our blunders and mishaps, we miss out on important opportunities to improve.

A well told story of failure is not only useful to ourselves. It's highly appreciated among listeners as well. It's a great relief to learn that failure is commonplace. Stories of failure put things in perspective. They encourages us to confront our own failures.

While stories of failure may turn some people away from us, it attracts the attention of the more sensitive and intelligent. Only the most superficial of people will react to an honest story of failure with scorn. Everybody else will enjoy it in their own way. Being open about failures is in this respect a great filter. It pushes away people of low quality and little worth to us as friends while attracting people of higher quality and higher worth. We end up with a better circle of friends by being open about failures.

This doesn't mean that we should constantly talk about our weaknesses and blunders. Certainly not in an unthinking way, where no analysis or context is provided. But we should always sprinkle our stories with little failures. It's a great mistake to think that we should only share our successes.

When my wife and I recently replaced two capacitors in her knitting machine, we immediately bragged about it in Facebook. It's fun to share this kind of successes, and it's fun to get the thumbs up from friends all over the place. The comment section lit up with praise. We were suddenly experts at fixing things in general, and it went a little to my head. I dished out advice left, right and center. In particular, there was a dishwasher that I thought I could help fix simply by talking about it. Then Karma hit. Our own dishwasher broke down. We got an F4 error.

Full of confidence, my wife and I found this video on YouTube. Then, we did exactly as the man said, yet the problem persisted. Something else seemed to be wrong as well. After a few more attempts at fixing the thing, we were still no further, and we have now given up.

This was a failure that we could have kept secret. However, its precisely this sort of failures that are worth sharing. Not least because this particular failure fitted so well into the context of me thinking myself an expert on dishwashers. My Facebook friends are now duly informed that I'm not the genius that I thought myself to be, and I'm sure the world is a little better for it.

By Photo credited to the firm Levy & fils by this site. (It is credited to a photographer "Kuhn" by another publisher [1].) - the source was not disclosed by its uploader., Public Domain, Link