Why Failure Should be Embraced in Education

Thoughts on what universities can learn from startups

In the world of startups, there is one thing most founders would agree on: failure, in one form or another, is inevitable.

Failure doesn’t necessarily imply the eternal collapse of a new venture — instead, it may simply involve repeatedly pivoting on existing ideas to pursue new paths. In other words, failure naturally leads to persistence. They go hand in hand. You can’t really persist if you don’t fail. And successful persistence is about failing fast, so you can figure out what works and what doesn’t sooner rather than later.

Most startups — at least most of the successful ones — were built through persistence. Take PayPal as an example. The company started off with the goal of beaming money to people over Palm Pilots. After several business model shifts, it became the online payment mechanism we now know. Max Levchin, the co-founder of PayPal and the Consigliere of the PayPal Mafia, started four (mostly unsuccessful) companies before starting PayPal as his fifth.

Another great example of persistence is the story of Tim Westergren, CEO of Pandora. He maxed out 11 credit cards and pitched his company 348 times before raising capital to build the business. Today, Pandora is the leading radio business with more than 3.8 billion hours of radio listening streamed.

The point: persistence can only be practiced if failure — a stepping stone to success — is accepted and embraced.

The problem, though, is that most universities don’t let students practice persistence in the classroom. Many students are taken through an assembly line that moves in one direction at a fixed pace — if you fail or miss out, there’s no going back. There is usually no room for iteration. A failed exam is a failed exam, and a failed class is a failed class. The only option in the event of failure, really, is to re-take a course. In this case, a student is certain to spend an extra two to eight months, while incurring more debt. This is not an opportunity for practicing persistence, as much it is a form of punishment that fosters fear of failure.

Startups don’t work that way. In startups, it is understood that failure is the norm — after all, 90% of startups do tank. And if you do start over, it is very unlikely that you will work on the exact same thing. This is a striking contrast to re-taking a failed academic course.

So when universities talk about fostering entrepreneurship — through holding a conference, starting a new program or class, or providing financial and logistical resources to students — they miss out on a core element that stimulates entrepreneurial thinking better than anything else: a culture in which failure is accepted and embraced.

So, how can universities foster entrepreneurship?

Fostering entrepreneurship is about embracing failure and promoting risk. Promoting risk requires systemic antidotes that prevent the fear of failure. And fear of failure — in an educational context — is driven by the prospect of bad grades that may lead to unemployment or societal rejection. So fostering entrepreneurship, if you think about it, is about letting people take bold risks, without punishing them with bad grades in the event of failure.

Ultimately, if our schools promote a healthy amount of risk-taking, students would have the opportunity to fail and embrace the nature of persistence. This cultural shift would turn universities into entrepreneurial engines.

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