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A TED Talk on Failure

While I know there are scarier things in the world, I consider failure to be among my top fears. Especially as a college student, there are several factors in the higher education world that eliminate the option of failure altogether: scholarships, graduate school, future employment, honors societies, the ability to participate in extracurricular activities, and the scariest numbers under 5 (that is, the G.P.A.) just to name a few. However, the TED Talk presented by Astro Teller on "The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure" sheds some light on the shadowy doom no ones wants to talk about.

Highlighting the secret to the successes of his company, X (formerly Google X), Teller offers insight on the benefits of failure. His project teams are encouraged to think big, tackle the largest obstacles to their ideas head-on, and abandon (essentially, fail) their projects when the obstacles become impractical to overcome. Employees are rewarded for failing projects that just aren't working out, growing their confidence to take bigger risks in the future. In an environment where big risks come with both big setbacks and big rewards, Teller makes celebrating failure seem far easier than some of the successful projects his teams have taken on. So, how can I celebrate failure in the classroom?

For me, the TED Talk inspired a willingness to tackle big ideas. Whether it be as a student learning to teach, or in the future as an educator, it is important for me to remember that I can try to make my ideas a reality. More importantly, I can fail trying. Even now, I find typing the phrase "I can fail trying" hard to swallow, but I hope that the more I try and fail, the easier it will be to accept failure as a step in the right direction.

For children and youth, I think it is important to emphasize the progress failure allows to occur. In my future classroom, I plan to encourage my students to take on their own big ideas. If and when they do not succeed, I hope to help them see that failure is only one step in the process. By creating an environment where failure is acceptable after noble attempts to succeed-- especially in an education system where students believe success is driven by G.P.A. and other evaluations-- I hope that I can make failure a little less scary for my students.


You can also check out the TED Talk on failure by Astro Teller here: "The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure"
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  1. mbJanuary 26, 2018 at 1:27 AM

    Very thoughtful and strong connections to self and other.

    ReplyDelete

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