Why School Is Wrong About Failure
For me, traditional education is sometimes a barrier to truly educating yourself. While it does allow you to learn the consequences of being lazy or having a lack of discipline, school often hinders your ability to freely learn. For many students, failure is something that they dread, but for entrepreneurs and people in general, failure is the car that drives you to improve yourself. When you fail in school, that’s it, you can’t go back to fix your errors and you can’t fix the permanent blemish that resides on your academic record. Traditional educational institutions teach that failure is something that is final and fatal, which is something that almost every successful entrepreneur disagrees with.
While engaging in entrepreneurial ventures, there is no scoreboard that keeps track of every loss, win or time when you just gave up. When an entrepreneur fails, they look back and analyze the mistakes they made and use those experiences to solidify an even better plan for themselves before they start their next venture.
At school, failure and growth are mutually exclusive, but in the real world, more specifically the world of entrepreneurship, failure and growth are conjoined at the hip. In the life of entrepreneurialism, failure tends to precede growth which is why early on in my life, I learned to accept my losses as improvement opportunities rather than what school had taught me they were.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
-Winston Churchill
