Fail Again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett is tired of your inspirational posters
On this would-be 116th birthday of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, let’s accept that the now-iconic quote from Worstward Ho! “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” has nothing to do with self-help. It isn’t about launching a business. It isn’t about running a marathon. It isn’t about becoming the best version of yourself after obsessively reading Atomic Habits.
I’m sure you’ve seen it before. Perhaps it was on a motivational poster in your high school cafeteria. Perhaps you read it on a blog post from a tech start-up. A disrupter. Odds are, wherever you saw it, someone had it wrong. That isn’t to say it’s misquoted. Indeed, Beckett did write these words (five times, in fact, over the course of the novella). But to just read these lines and draw a conclusion would be a bit like saying The Grapes of Wrath is about a road trip. We really aren’t getting the whole story.
The common takeaway from “Fail again. Fail better.” is that what we need to do in the face of adversity is persevere. That if we keep going, things will eventually get better. That every failure will fail a little less until we achieve success. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. You can do it, buddy! Each iteration more saccharine than the last.
