The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on May 18, 2014
Idolising failure in hope of success
Hope is the thing with drills and hammers.
I try not to get excited when I see drilling and hammering going on for weeks as retail spaces in my neighbourhood get renovated for new eateries and shops.
Shiny new furniture sitting inside, shiny proud faces of owners standing outside.
I try not to care because I have seen so many shops there close down within months of opening. And the whole renovation cycle starts again.
Hope is the thing with feathers, wrote poet Emily Dickinson. Hope is probably what helps some would-be entrepreneurs fly the coop, to escape from a salaried life into the tough one of setting up their own businesses, even as the risk of failure perches nearby like an ominous raven.
I wonder if quite a number of people who hammer away at setting up their own businesses are mentally cushioned by fail-fuelled pep talks that go along the lines of: "Fail fast! Fail early! Fail cheap!" That commonly heard advice for entrepreneurs asserting that businessmen shouldn't be too fussed about messing up because it is better to find out quickly what's not working and move on before it costs them too much.
All that talk about wearing your failures as battle scars and badges of honour. Does fetishising failure help or hinder us?
Small-business failure rates vary according to where the statistics come from, but they do yo-yo on the grimmer side. Here is a sampling:
From a statement from the Ministry of Trade and Industry in reply to a parliamentary question a couple of years ago on business failure rates among small and medium-sized enterprises: "What we know, for instance, is that in the United States, for 10 new businesses formed, about eight to nine businesses would cease operations in the same year. Our comparable numbers are between seven and eight..."
The BBC reports that more than 80 per cent of start-up businesses fail within the first five years.
Talk about running businesses on a wing and a prayer.
As I peer into another space in the neighbourhood that is being renovated for a new eatery, I spot a vintage chalkboard with the name of a cafe scrawled on it that does not match the one on the door. I find wonderful reviews of that old coffee shop on the Internet but also read posts about it closing down for good. A day later, the old cafe name is wiped away from the board.
Another one bites the (chalk) dust.
But remaking the image of failure into a more cuddly concept continues apace. And embracing failure is not just for business owners. The idea of using failure to unleash creativity and build character could prove energising to the rest of us.
The British media reported that one school there held a "failure week" to help nurture resilience. Another conducted a maths test in which (without the schoolchildren's knowledge) it was actually impossible to achieve 100 per cent, "to prevent students becoming obsessed with perfection".
In Dublin, at Trinity College's Science Gallery, a recent exhibition entitled "Fail better" had the goal of opening up a public conversation about failure. "Rather than simply celebrating failure, which can come at great human, environmental and economic cost, we want to open up a debate on the role of failure in stimulating creativity: in learning, in science, engineering and design."
So does making failure more huggable help us? Optimistically, yes.
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." As a Slate report says, these "six disembodied imperatives" from the Samuel Beckett prose piece Worstward Ho "have in their strange afterlife as a motivational meme come to much greater prominence than the text itself. The entrepreneurial class has adopted the phrase with particular enthusiasm, as a battle cry for a start-up culture…"
Here, remaking the image of failure flies into a territory where it appears nearly uncool to even try to dampen the risk of failing.
There is an established Silicon Valley conference called FailCon for entrepreneurial types to study their own and other people's failures, and to hear about how failing actually makes them more likely to succeed in the future. A version of the conference was held in Singapore too.
So does fetishising failure in the context of start-ups hurt us? Yes and no.
The New Yorker notes that "because we don't know how to identify good companies in advance, investors end up funding lots of them in the hope that a few will hit it big… The economy has come to rely on this Darwinian process to drive innovation".
Mr Brian Wu, a professor of strategy at the University of Michigan, told the magazine: "Overconfidence means that many more companies start up than will ever succeed. That's unfortunate for individual companies. The paradox is that it's really beneficial for society."
Hope is the thing with a fish hook stuck through it.
Baiting the next would-be entrepreneur.
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