FAIL YOUR WAY TO CREATIVITY AND SUCCESS
By Letha Barnes, Director of the Career Institute

That’s right, failure is an essential part of today’s formula for success! The key, however, is learning to fail swiftly and insightfully. The need for creativity is an integral part of success in all levels of business and education. When you think about it, the lessons we learn from failure are among the most valuable experiences we have. Our failures teach us valuable lessons in life, such as perseverance, flexibility, the value of modesty and even positive thinking and visualization.

Creative people deal with failure on a daily basis. Let’s consider Thomas Alva Edison, for example, and his invention of the light bulb. His toughest challenge was finding the right material for the filament. He filled more than 40,000 pages with notes before he finally had a bulb that withstood a 40-hour test in his laboratory. In 1869, after testing more than 1,600 materials, including coconut fiber, fishing line, and even hair from a friend’s beard, he finally figured out that the proper material for the filament was carbonized bamboo. The world remembers Edison for his successes of inventing the light bulb or improving on other innovative inventions of his time, not the tens of thousands of failed attempts before he achieved his goal.

Creative action involves the trial and error process of exploration. The only path to discovery is to take creative ideas and try them out, even if you realize most will fail. Out of a hundred ideas, perhaps ten or so will merit enough attention to try out or only one or two will look promising. Therefore, to experience success, we need to follow the first of four suggestions for greater creativity.

Hint #1: Keep the information channel full of ideas. The way to accomplish this is to read, watch, observe, and ask questions. We need to read newspapers, books, magazines, and more. We need to watch and observe people and processes and hitchhike onto their ideas. We need to ask questions and build a strong network of professionals that can help us succeed. Brainstorming with successful people will help you increase your own creativity enormously.

Hint #2: Fail with insight. After all, history repeats itself, but we don’t have to. There’s nothing more depressing than repeating a failure, so we need to learn from our failures rather than try to hide them. We need to examine the failure for clues and learn how not to make the same mistake again. Mary Pickford said, “When you make a mistake, don’t look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind, and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.”

Hint #3: Fail swiftly. Don’t try out one idea and wait to see if it works and then maybe try a variation on the idea. Throw many ideas on the table at once and try out the best ones simultaneously. This speeds up results and improves your learning curve. Another factor is that we won’t be as devastated by a failure as we would be if our only idea failed. By testing lots of ideas at once, we have a better chance that one or two will succeed. A tree doesn’t drop one seed and wait to see if it grows. It drops thousands at once and at least one grows!

Hint #4: Succeed in reverse. Through the brainstorming process we should come up with a list of totally wild and outrageous ideas, perhaps even dumb ones first and build from those. The value of this mental exercise is to stretch our minds in the opposite direction and make even the lousiest ideas work. We need to look into that scrap pile of former failures and ideas that didn’t work. Potential winning ideas may be hidden there. Edison said, “I can never pick up a thing without wishing to improve it.”

Clearly, these four hints can apply in our daily lives, in our jobs as educators and perhaps, even more importantly in helping our students understand the process of achieving success. When a student attempts his first perm wrap, finger wave, or acrylic nail and fails miserably, he can become completely disillusioned and think he has chosen the wrong career path. By teaching him these four key hints, he may realize that success is just a few failures away!

The Career Institute is excited to bring you the latest in teaching methods and techniques to support your professional development plan and to enhance the classroom experience for your learners. Please read our Teaching Tips section in each newsletter for additional support.

Letha Barnes, Director of The Career Institute