Mistakes, failure and growth

Last week Brené Brown offered a succinct and potent perspective on embarrassment, shame and guilt via Time magazine. “We’re handling failure with a lot of lip service,” she notes. 

It's very of-the-moment, isn’t it -- to admit a minor set-back, an infinitesimal error? Oops, we stumbled!

Mistakes seem trendy. And devoid of cost. Insert your favorite Instagram feel-good typographic image here. Brown says:

“When failure doesn’t hurt, it’s not failure.”

I smile a wan smile reading that quote of her’s. Without the pain, nothing really moves, nothing really grows, does it? Great ideas require an exchange and sometimes the ask is you or me, failing. That's tough to accept as an ideas person, much less get used to as a manager of idea people. 

I'm not suggesting we cut cake every time someone fails. Maybe just be a little more forthright and candid in allowing failure to function. We're wired to avoid pain. But we need to feel it, to acknowledge it. As Brown notes in her interview:

“He or she who is the most capable of being uncomfortable rises the fastest.”

And then this ad from 1971 shows up on my radar.

Reminds me somewhat of GE's recent "Ideas Are Scary" commercial -- e.g. as 3M's ad describes, "[Mistakes] can very quickly begin to look beautiful." And didn't Bernbach et al deliver this same "failure leads to beauty" concept for VW back in the 60s? 

Anyway. There's something important here. (For the record, 3M is a client. I found this ad amidst a collection of work our agency produced from 1945 onward.) I've read the copy a dozen times now. I wonder. What circumstance inspired its creation? Was someone fed up with the lip service applied to mistake-making? What kind of fear did the first layout elicit from the agency account team, the clients, the legal department? And isn't it awesome they hired Gahan Wilson to draw the art and they printed his signature? And who doesn't love the lower case "i" in Gill Sans Extra Bold? Back on subject — the ad states: 

“Everyone who is alive and moving makes mistakes. You know it. We know it.”

I suspect the pain of failure inspired this idea. Enough pain to move neurons, to instigate daring; to inspire an investment in media. And of course the point here isn't to dwell in darkness. Failure and its pain are catalysts. The ad continues:

“The trick is to learn from your mistakes and move on, using what you have learned.”

Not all creative effort includes failure. Sometimes you get lucky. But it seems to me that failure has to happen. Once. Every so often. A lot. But it has to happen. Or the great ideas stay hidden longer. 

If we're in the business of ideas, then we are also in the business of failure -- whatever its price.  

We probably don't talk about this enough, either.