Fallor ergo sum: I err, therefore I am

There's no doubt about it: failure is the new black.  We have come a long way from "Failure is not an option," that memorable phrase uttered in the movie Apollo 13 by Ed Harris while channeling Gene Kranz, the flight director.  Later, on the cover of his book Gene Kranz would quote Ed Harris paraphrasing Gene Kranz (Gene insists that he only uttered the phrase after Ed had).

In retrospect, perhaps it's not surprising that such an emphatic view would engender a dissent.  Indeed I can trace a different perspective back to the book To Engineer is Human, published 22 years after the Apollo 13 mission but before the Apollo 13 movie.  Although the author, Henry Petroski, didn't exactly applaud failure, he reserved the banquet room and picked out the music.  Success, he points out (I'm paraphrasing here), leads to hubris, which leads to failure, which leads to humility, which leads to success.  Without failure, then, you can't get back to success.

Contemporary literature goes way beyond Petroski's modest defense.  Tavis Smiley titles his book Fail Up: 20 Lessons on Building Success from Failure.  That's fine and dandy, but is it possible to build success without failure?  Good question!  Tim Harford answers it in his new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure (you can read excerpts on slate.com here and here). Malcolm Gladwell strikes similar themes in Creation Myth.  There is a class titled "The Art of Failure" at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (disclosure: I am a friend of the professor).

But if any single person leads the current failure fad, I think it may be Kathryn Schulz. She authored the book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, which led to an entertaining blog on Slate, The Wrong Stuff.  She recently presented at an invitation-only TED conference, begging the obvious paradox, Is it wrong for a failure expert to be a success?  You can see her talk here; look for the part where she asks the audience, composed exclusively of successful people, what it feels like to be wrong (my title of this post is borrowed from her talk).

I'll conclude with this quote from her CNN article, Why being wrong is good for you:

Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction and courage

There is hope for me!