Who Welcomes Failure?

I do. Hi. My name is James Hill and I'm an officer in the Army. Let me tell you why I welcome failure. Many times throughout my Army career I have come across the mantra that "Failure is not an option." It's true, in many things we do, failure has devastating results. So why welcome it? Practice. Practice, practice, practice. What am I practicing? Getting up.

There are so many motivational sayings, song lyrics and personal stories that highlight the importance of getting back up after you fall, but I don't think many people understand why this is crucial for success. Every time you fail, you have two choices before you. Yoda's "Do or do not. There is no try," is especially true here. You can get up and try again, or you can give up. If this doesn't make sense, because you are "trying again," you missed the point. You can get up, or give up. The thing you failed at is not as important as recovering from the failure.

The more times you fail, the more times you are required to coach yourself into trying again. This takes mental endurance and heart. In one word: "Grit." How many times have you seen a sports team lose momentum in the middle of a game and lose because of it? One failure caused another failure, which caused another and another because the team couldn't recover from it. Michael Jordan said that "obstacles do not have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it."

Dominic Randolf is the headmaster at a prominent school in New York City where tuition for prekindergarten starts at $38,500. He's more interested in a student's character rather than his or her IQ level. He worries about "people who have an easy time [with] things", those with high IQs or who get perfect scores on their SAT's, "get feedback that everything they're doing is great... As a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment... [they haven't] grown the capacities to be able to handle that."

I figure that recovering from a failure does two things for me. One, I learn something I shouldn't repeat, but I also practice strengthening my character. Thomas Edison found 3,000 ways not to make light bulbs and he didn't give up. Albert Einstein says that "it's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." But my favorite is from Lance Armstrong: "If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on."

Major James Hill is attending the Intermediate Level Education (ILE) out of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. His views expressed in this blog are personal and not necessarily those of official policy, ILE or of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.