
Ask HN: Should we start celebrating failure just like a success? - mkovji
Would that make everything twice better? 
and increase positiveness?
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yesenadam
I saw that the whole thing was made up and that the game of success was just
that, a game. I realized I could invent another game. I settled on a game
called _I am a contribution_. Unlike success and failure, contribution has no
other side... "How will I be a contribution today?" ... Just look carefully at
the cover of the box, and if the rules do not light up your life, put it away,
take out another one you like better, and play the game wholeheartedly.
Remember, it's all invented. - Ben Zander, _The Art of Possibility_

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you usually succeed interestingly. -
Edward Albee

While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making
mistakes and becoming superior. - Henry C. Link

Most people die of a kind of creeping common sense. They discover too late
that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes. - Oscar Wilde

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good
spirits. - R. L. Stevenson

We do not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought
ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished,
and much was begun in us. - Emerson

 _Hard Times_. In this contradictory world of Truth the hard times come when
the good times are in the world of commerce; namely, sleep, fulleating, plenty
of money, care of it, and leisure; these are the hard times. Nothing is doing
and we lose every day. - Emerson, journal

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andrei_says_
Of course not "just like a success."

When you reach success you are done (for now), and can enjoy the momentary
satisfaction of having manifested your intention.

When you fail, you get to learn, to introspect, to face your emotions and
often your "shadow" \-- all the education and patterning which make you flinch
or love yourself less in the presence of mistakes/failure.

It's an invitation to learn to work with these, to learn new ways to approach
the issue, to improvise, be creative, to grow, to improve and master yourself
and the matter at hand.

Worth celebration, but very much not "just like success."

A third option, which anyone touched by stoicism or let's say vipassana would
be aware of, is to be equally equaniminous to each.

Learn to reduce the amplitude of the hope and fear associated with each. This
will give you access to calmer, steadier experience as you create, manifest,
learn and grow.

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clusmore
I think it's really about how you define success and failure. For example, you
have a great idea for a product and you decide to form a startup to build it.
If you define success as "built the product and made lots of money", both
outcomes "couldn't build it" and "built it but nobody wanted it" are
considered failures. If you define success as "discovered whether or not this
can be built, and whether it can form the basis of a viable business", then
those two outcomes are considered successes.

Your goal should be to identify the major risks in whatever you're doing, and
then set your success criteria to either confirm or overcome those risks as
quickly/cheaply as possible. Failure is then only whether you spent too much
time/money, not necessarily what the outcome was.

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fjones12
Many of the most successful people I know acknowledge and celebrate their
failures as the learning experiences they are. They believe that if you're not
failing, you're not trying hard enough, and every single failure is an
opportunity to do something better next time. I love this attitude.

I suspect that most people who do this also don't see "success" as a finite
achievement - a thing to be reached, celebrated and completed. Success is a
constantly moving target, and requires overcoming many small failures.

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xstartup
Usually, when you fail - there is no money left for any celebration. That's
why i've am unable to throw parties when i fail. I would love to otherwise :)

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AnimalMuppet
Some company (DEC, maybe?) defined what they called a "perfect failure". You
tried something, it failed, _you recognized that it was a failure and stopped
doing it_ , and you learned something. They celebrated those as though a very
good thing had happened - which, from there perspective, it had.

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smattiso
It depends on what you mean by failure. If you build a MySpace/AOL/Netscape
and 15 years later it "fails", most people will celebrate you. However if you
spend three years in your garage building a CRM tool that never launches, that
will be uninteresting to most and therefore not celebrated.

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pasbesoin
When your doctor "fails", should you celebrate that?

People need perspective including into the scale of risk -- and _to whom._

Some things are recoverable. Others are not. Don't confuse them.

Also, don't wager _other people 's_ futures with your own rash and
inexperienced actions.

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ai_ia
This will be akin to the participation certificateband consolation prizw that
are being handed out to every kid who participates in a race so that he
doesn't feel bad. And my take will be firmly against this sort of infantilism.

~~~
mkovji
Many did not even participate, so they don't get any certificate. So its a
perfectly good thing to give a participation certificate to those who are
willing to join the game.

Everyone gets a participatory certificate and one person ended up becoming a
winner. I don't think the winner knew upfront before the race that he would be
the winner.

------
claymav
I've heard it said that success is its own reward, and I think that in some
ways that can be true.

It's probably not a good idea to treat them the same, but maybe trying to
celebrate the effort, not the outcome.

