If you're not failing you're not trying.

It is not about professional activities. I do not expect airline pilot to try new tricks fully loaded with passengers, but I appreciate Wrights brothers efforts to try to put the man in the air in the first place. If they were afraid to try, if hundreds of others who tried it before them and failed were afraid to try, we could be still dreaming about flying.

Bit it's not about innovation either. It's about pedestrian activities which one is afraid to take because of fear of failure. It could be going to play football with friends after 20 years of not playing. It could be trying to ride the first bike a kid got in front of his neighbours. It could be starting your own business. It could be anything one would like to do but his fear of failure stops him.

It's not about taking stupid risks (the airline pilot). It's about calculated risks and eliminating public failure as something one consider critically harmful. If your failure could cost you $1000 and some public exposure and it's the reason you won't try, but you would try if it'd cost you $2000 without public exposure - well, that's what this post is about. To learn to put less "value" on public exposure of your failures so that you'd stop considering it being such a big cost of potential failure.

Michael Jordan Failure Commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc

After growing up watching MJ play, it speaks volumes.

Well played sir

I don't agree with this whole glorification-of-failure stuff that is posted occasionally.

It's not that I see failure as particularly bad, or horrible. It's that it's not the point. The point is to WIN. When you launch a startup, and fail, try again. But wouldn't it have been better to succeed? Isn't the point to make money, or build a platform, or win the game? Not every product has a market. Not every customer call will result in a sale. But the point is to make a winner.

Why would you purposely seek out failure?

Of course, the undercurrent here is that in order to succeed - in order to win big - you must risk a lot, and risk failure. Risking failure is necessary. Making mistakes happens. If you're not risking failure or humiliation, you're not playing the best game you can.

Risking failure is not the same as actually failing.

Maybe that's just semantics, but it is a very important difference. If you're purposely seeking failure, I feel sorry for you.

But that airline pilot has been failing on a regular basis for years.

He learned to fly in a little single engine plane, and routinely recovered it from stalls and even spins. His instructor would have him close his eyes, then throw the plane out of balance and have him attempt to correct it by feel (and he'd often fail to do so). He's crashed that very jet you're riding in dozens or even hundreds of times in the simulator. He's even recovered a real one from a stall during his certification.

The only reason he's good enough to be trusted to fly with you in the back is because he's been training to failure all those years.