Ask HN: Should we start celebrating failure just like a success?

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

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.