Failure is more interesting than success. That's pretty clear, but it is not to say that failure is ok.
* Obviously, your young people do not need someone crushing their self-confidence, but removing failure from their school experience, in other words hiding their weaknesses, is not only stupid but, in a competitive world, cruel. To do the same thing in Further Education is abhorrent (is it the case that employers faced with worldwide 'graduate' applications, identify woefully few universities deemed remotely rigorous?). In an ideal school every one of your kids would have strengths identified and encouraged. But do see that failure is, in a very real sense, educational also - failure limits self-delusions. That's the point. Self-deluded people are both ugly and boring. Failure also clarifies just how skilled the successful sometimes are (removing the lucky, the connected, and the bullying). Failure leads to a clearer appreciation of the skills of those of you who are able to achieve.
* When young an absence of any awareness of personal failure, and any coming to terms with it, might lead to some soundless and horrifically fascinating tragedies in the later 'grown up' world surely? Perhaps it was the case with the man who was walking the streets of Canterbury (UK) for at least two decades, wearing a business suit and carrying a rectangular black brief-case - but he'd never been employed. The man was taken care of by his mother, for though he'd been wildly encouraged at school he'd failed all those early job-interviews. And perhaps it is the case with those boys that every police constabulary can tell you of, the ones who are dropped by the girlfriend and who commit suicide - having just sent, or sometimes leaving by the body, a note to the girl, a note that is designed to make her feel guilty if it can. And a far larger number this time, the ones that police constabularies do not hear of, the ones who find their partners moving on to another, the ones who walk right out of their studies and who never do get the university degree, who never marry thereafter but sort of manage ok or who, at least in the case of one author's (Primo Levi) grandfather, stay in bed for 27 years.
* Of course a separation is often made between failing in a skill, and being a failure as a person. 'Doing' failure is one thing: 'being' a failure is quite another. And so failing to do your job as well as the other people is one thing; but interpreting the moving-on of your partner - someone who knows you inside and out - as you being a failure is something different. This separation between two types of failure does impact upon how you cope with failure. Failure to 'do something well' can be taken in your stride quite easily perhaps, or doused with the self-delusion antiseptic of 'Well I could if I tried harder'. But if you have a personality that you yourself regard as unimpressive, or something worse than that, you might wonder whether you really can do much about it? And what about a failure to attract because of your appearance? There are things you can do, no doubt, but only up to a point.
* Generally, the older of you have been forced to see some of your limitations at least. Perhaps it is the case that by 20yrs old many of the young have experienced, and more intensely than they ever will afterwards, all that is important (and the rest is detail and coming to terms with) but the young do of course have less history to look back on. Do they, alongside the life-enhancing dreams and aspirations, cradle more self-delusions? Though naturally some older people blithely mouth off astonishing self-delusions just like the young. The actress Charlotte Rampling, with astounding self-delusion, actually believed that she could 'get anyone she wants', and this statement from (to put it crudely) a small-titted woman 'in her prime', when said in the presence of men who only enjoy bit tits and women far younger than she, betrays a profound ignorance. A woman doubtless surrounding herself with bias confirmation.
* Then there is the businessman who is faced with an unsolvable problem, a failure then, a man who then astonishingly pats himself on the back for 'thinking outside the box' and solving a different problem which overarches the first problem. There is an ugly consequence of doing this which is always overlooked. The human conceit is this - a manager is tasked with the problem of getting magnetic clips for his kitchen cabinets by Friday; he fails to get them; instead he finds a supplier of doors that hang and don't need clips at all; bravo he! The problem he was set was to get those clips by Friday; he shifts the problem to a wider problem of shutting cabinet doors. The ugly consequence is not in ducking the issue - the imagination is interesting - the ugly consequence is in a misplaced pride in adaptation and a blind ignorance of how frequently he is failing to achieve a specific task. And does that not frequently lead to the later catastrophic collapse of his business when, for example, he just cannot see the imminent need, perhaps, to diversify (his market is about to disappear) or, for instance, the imminent need to stop using debt to trade (a collapse in the wider financial market) because he is ignorant of how often he fails, and he is stupidly ignorant of how vicious, over the medium term, the outside markets are? As well as patting yourself on the back for how often you change the problem, acknowledge how often you actually cannot solve a problem. Surely? Once you're rid of your profoundly ignorant self-delusions, then perhaps you'll get more nervous, see wider, and perhaps manage to keep that salary going for another decade.
* 'Failure' and those Asian cultures (others?) where maintaining 'face' trumps everything else. Oh dear. If you have created a tribe in which a lower status man dare not call out the idiocies of a higher status man because the latter will lose face, and in which rubbish performance is still rewarded lest the student/boss/village elder/politician loses face, then you will, rightly, never be allowed to sit at the world's Big Boys' table.
* How many of you actually know what 'the best' looks like? Most of you, by the definition of the word, are not 'the best' at what you do. But have you ever been shown the best? Years ago I asked a retired lady school-headmistress whether she could describe how that one genius teacher that every headteacher has come across in her career, differed from the average teachers. She could not even understand the question. In my years as a driving-instructor I had never sat in the back of a lesson given by one of the best in the business, and nor had any other instructors in the land. We never ever knew what 'the best' looked like.
* And failure is just more interesting than success. Film of all those losers in the beauty pageant obliged to applaud the beaming winner, and recordings of all the conversations about the failure to win, these things are more interesting than the sugary success of the actual winner. And who remembers that magazine photographer who used to attend the Olympic Games and who ignored every jolly winner in the arena? The man who used to photograph the look on the face of the losers as they sat on the field removing their running-shoes. Of course, of them all he was the most interesting commentator on your human condition.
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