We Need To Teach Society To Be Proud Of Failures

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Sometimes, as human beings, we always try to portray ourselves as being successful, happy and achieving everything we want.
Now with social media, it becomes even more so when all we ever highlight are the good things and never the bad. I don’t think it’s a social media thing. Who would want to highlight the bad stuff in their lives for the public?
My wife, Sheril, brought up something interesting to me the other day. She said my eldest daughter, Athena, looks up to me and tries hard to be like me. However, the way she sees it is that Athena observes my life as if everything that I have achieved (it’s nothing that grand, really) just fell into my lap without much work at all.
Apparently, the way I portray myself is that everything came easily. When I was in school, I didn’t have to study hard for good grades and be accepted into boarding school. When I started working, it didn’t take me much effort to get the jobs I wanted and to be happy with what I have. So, because of that, Athena thinks she doesn’t have to work hard either.
However, the truth is that I like to pretend that things came easily for me. During my school days, I studied hard. In my lower secondary days, I would wake up at 4am to study for my PMR exams. In my upper secondary days, I struggled with Add Maths and had to seek the help of my friends to help me understand how to use the different complex formulas.
In university, I didn’t know what I wanted to study, and I changed my major a total of five times. Luckily, I didn’t have to extend more semesters and finished with honours anyway. But it wasn’t without work.
When I started working in journalism, I was a menial reporter in the beginning, like everybody else, and when I wanted to direct films, I had to pay my dues producing B grade corporate videos for cheap clients.
Whatever my daughter sees today is 40 years of effort in the making. Yes, for the most part, I get to do exactly the kind of work I want now. I also get to make a comfortable living with the work I do.
The time I have is my own to manage. I am not financially rich by any means, but I am comfortable, and I feel blessed and thankful for whatever I have, hence I feel successful.
Learning and improving
My point is that a lot of effort was put in throughout my life. But the fact that human beings have been conditioned to only look at success as a key driver and indicator of achieving something, we tend not to focus on the work and effort put in, and one very big element of that is failure.
If you study success and failure, you will realise that those with the most success would have also had the worst failures.
I learned this listening to an episode of Freakonomics on failure, where they interviewed a whole bunch of social scientists and researchers on their findings about successful people and the failures that they have experienced. The biggest takeaway was that society needs to destigmatise failure and not see it as something embarrassing.
Failure is part of the normal process of learning and improving. It is only through doing things and failing that we learn what not to do anymore or how to do things better and more efficiently. For example, when I started writing, my first article wasn’t very good and needed a whole lot of editing from my editors. But I got better throughout the years of experience (but maybe many would still argue otherwise).
Also, my first ever documentary film that I made more than twenty years ago makes me cringe to watch now. However, I believe that after making so many over the years, the documentaries I make now are much better. We need to condition our society not to look down on people’s failures and instead to celebrate them.
The two main reasons are that, first, it will convince people that it is okay to fail and to learn from the mistakes they have made. The important thing here is to learn from the failure. Secondly, when we aren’t too afraid of failing, it gives us more confidence to experiment and try new ideas, which will speed up progress and development.
Don’t punish failures too fast
This also means that we should not be too fast to punish failure. Many times, failures of individuals are the result of bigger and more systematic failures.
For example, if a government servant down the line makes a mistake, it is most probably because of failures in the entire system all the way up. Instead of punishing the one individual, it should be seen as an opportunity to pinpoint flaws and make improvements.
When an individual is afraid to make known a mistake he or she made, then it might never surface, and the problem might never be addressed. Most mistakes and errors are not intentional so we need to be able to evaluate and judge that for what it is. Things will never improve in an environment that just indiscriminately faults all those who make mistakes and fail.
So for Athena, and also my two other children, Alethea and Achilles, I will try to share all of my life experiences with all of you so that hopefully, you can see that failing and making mistakes is part of developing as a person.
I also hope that society will slowly embrace the fact that we can be proud of failing and not criticise it prematurely, because eventually, it will lead to our success. - Mkini
ZAN AZLEE is a writer, documentary filmmaker, journalist and academic. Visit fatbidin.com to view his work.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.

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