After some thought, I have decided to summarize the “failure series” simply and briefly. The particulars of what I’ve learned through not obtaining what I wanted and thought that I wanted regarding; Harvard, Facebook, the New York Times, etc, are entirely personal. Those experiences and lessons reside within me and no matter how they are articulated, I believe that there is something personal and nontransferable about failure. That “something” is not instructive en mass, it is experiential. It is informative primarily, if not exclusively, to one’s self. This of course, bucks conventional wisdom that clearly, and to some extent sensibly, suggests that wise people learn from their mistakes, but that those who are truly wise learn from the mistakes of others. While often true and obvious, this is applicable primarily in broad strokes and big chunks.

There is an incredible grey zone of nuance which is where true, deep rooted failures and lessons reside. Ours is the original, while second party observation amounts to a less vibrant and less than reliable transfer. Transferred lessons may even be reasonably described as counterfeit; a mere recitation of facts and outcomes without original and inherent value.

Young children are the ultimate learners and they learn very little, if anything, by proxy. Theirs is experiential and firsthand. The first few years of life are deemed to be the most lesson-rich, but is it because there is comparatively little else to learn afterward, or is it because we bifurcate learning into direct and indirect experiences reserving “indirect” for the most unpleasant of life’s offerings? At which point in our development do we veer from the first-person in favor of secondhand lessons? No longer are we tasting and touching everything, true; but how safe and childproof do we expect the edges and sudden drops of the world to be as we scale the unsteady wall of life?  How, and how much do we expect to learn?

We must fail personally to extract value from the experience. We are not note taking observers. Life is not the case study method that serves condensed business cycles on a silver platter. No one studying a business case loses sleep worrying about whether they will make payroll or stay out of jail as the result of something they did or did not do. As such, that student could never fully learn the resulting lessons. The circumstances along with the lessons to be extracted are both individual and indelible.

There are easy lessons to take away from the experiences of others. Staying clear of prostitutes and drugs, for example, are among the most obvious and do not need to be experienced firsthand. These however, would be “mistakes”, things that we already know better than to do, or know better than to expect them to be consequence free. While there is an overlap in the definitions of “mistake” and “failure”, mistakes seem to occur on a treadmill or hamster wheel, while failures occur on the open road and give rise to new experiences and discovery.

The reasons that people make mistakes are undoubtedly many, but one of them is almost certainly that while they knew about the failures of others, those failures were never real enough. This is so partly because of our hubris and being predisposed to thinking that bad things happen primarily to others; but also because knowledge does not truly “take” unless it is derived first-hand. That’s why my parents seldom told me the meanings of words, for example, they made me look them up. That’s why we believe in practice ; practicing music, sports, mathematical problems. We have to practice failing in order to learn the most from it, and to ultimately learn how not to do it. We can not simply observe and expect to learn at the same rate or at the same depth. As such I have opted not to turn my personal failures into a spectacle or to delude others into thinking that they will learn incredible amounts from them. I also do not want to spend any time rehashing them simply put, and I’d prefer to write about other things.

We must redefine how we view failure. Failure should be seen as an essential and forward looking exercise. No longer should it be perceived as something from which we do not benefit, or that benefits us only (and best) from a distance.