“If you don’t fail, then you aren’t even trying” is the most oft-quoted line from Denzel Washington’s 2011 graduation speech at the University of Pennsylvania. The speech, regarded amongst the most iconic commencement addresses of all time by CNN, urges listeners to view failure as a critical step to reaching unprecedented accomplishments. If you try enough times, then you will eventually succeed.
In 2024, Washington’s optimism and fearless attitude can seem myopic. After all, 2011 was a year of progress. Global economies rebounded after the Great Recession, advances in leukemia technology resulted in a breakthrough in cancer treatment and the Occupy Wall Street movement forced corporations to rethink their unethical actions. Now, faced with a contentious Presidential election and an uncertain future, optimizing for failure seems like folly.
After all, failure implies that we’ve messed up, fallen short of a goal or become too distracted to focus on what’s really important. Failure is embarrassing — something that should be avoided at all costs. But failure is also inevitable. Can you think of a friend who has never failed? Failure, in an instant, can shatter the reputation you have worked for a lifetime to protect. If failure is both cataclysmic and ubiquitous, then how can any gains ever be realized?
The answer lies in changing our perspective on failure. Embracing failure doesn’t mean lowering our standards and condoning inaction. But it does entail a wholistic reevaluation of what success looks like and a deeper examination of why we want the things that we want. Failure is the engine that drives change. By setting ourselves up for failure, we change the world.
Gen Z (those of us born after 1997) are often criticized for being averse to failure, part of a broader narrative of young people’s softness and intolerance to opposing ideas. And this is by-on-large true. Research has shown that Gen Zers have “a heightened aversion to negative events, including failure.” Part of this can be attributed to the pervasive cultural narrative that society is made up of two distinct groups, the winners and the losers, and it sucks to be on the losing side.
Furthermore, the dogma goes, winners owe nothing to the losers, regardless of how they won. An example of this worldview is clearly communicated in Nike’s ad aired during the Paris 2024 Olympics. The commercial, titled “Winning Isn’t For Everyone,” lambastes the values of empathy, compassion, respect and humility, all while displaying a slideshow of the world’s most successful athletes. It broadcasts that core human values are antithetical to success in competition.
In another age, such an ideology would be denounced as authoritarian propaganda. But today, ruthless winning is a vogue marketing strategy. If winning is seen as necessary at all costs and losing means a life filled with pain and agony, then of course Gen Z would avoid failure at any price.
The problem is that failure isn’t a path to death and destruction, it’s the foundation upon which innovation is built on. To produce something new that is useful for society, one must experiment in uncharted waters. In this realm, there are no training wheels — no academic literature to rely upon, no instruction manual to follow, and no assurance of success. These are spaces where failure is most likely to occur, and, in some cases, is inevitable. Doing something that humanity has never done before is an iterative process. Research from the University of Bristol Business School has shown that failure disrupts the status quo, puts fundamental truths in question and aids in the knowledge transfer process. Indeed, failure is the driver of America’s economic success. One of America’s greatest attractions is that provides a space to fail, and thus learn.
Imagine this. One day you woke up and every time you played your favorite sport, you won. Despite how hard your opponent played or how much talent they accrued; you would inevitably win. Would you still play the game?
In the same way, what is the point of living life if you know that you will succeed in everything you do? The predictability of your success diminishes its significance. Yet, despite this, we expect perfection from ourselves and struggle to learn from mistakes when things inevitably go wrong. The craving for success is an indication that one’s actions are extrinsically motivated — as in, rooted in power, money and fame. Yet, a true embracing of failure comes only when one is intrinsically motivated, when someone is willing to do something regardless of the outcome.
Many figures we celebrate as successes lived lives marked by failure. According to his own record, Thomas Edison failed 2,774 times before successfully developing an incandescent lightbulb. We can learn something from Edison’s approach to failure. He famously said, “I have not failed 10,000 times — I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” Duke professor and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Robert Lefkowitz, stated that most of the research he does fails. Over his many years of mentoring students, he noticed how the ones who initially struggled the most eventually became the most accomplished scientists. This is because these individuals weren’t afraid of risk — they relished the opportunity to engage with the most vexing challenges.
Our society needs more failures. With our minds glued to the hedonic treadmill of success, we render failure impossible. By minimizing the possibility of failure we are unable to solve our own problems and the problems of those around us. To solve pressing problems, we need to create a learning environment that incentivizes failure. This doesn’t mean more superficial "fail fests" or A’s for effort, but a framework that teaches us how to fail and glean valuable information from that failing. In order to learn from our mistakes, we have to acknowledge that we make mistakes in the first place.
Encouraging failure is hard. But living with the regret of unpursued dreams for fear of trying is harder.
Aaron Siegle is a Trinity junior. His pieces typically run on alternate Fridays.
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