Two books on Failure

Books about failure put both their authors and their readers in awkward positions. Writers are at pains to abase themselves somewhat, to show that they know the terrain by sacrificing some dignity without losing all credibility. Many readers, meanwhile, may be willing to ponder how they fail or why they fear it, but few will pick up a book for people who think of themselves as “failures.” Add to this the fact that all books fail to be everything their authors hoped and that almost all books fail to sell, and it becomes clear why books about failure remain few and far between. So how do we learn to stop worrying and love it when we bomb? 

These two authors appear to have worried about failure more than they have experienced it. Sarah Lewis, an art historian and curator who was named to O, the Oprah Magazine’s 2010 “O Power List,” celebrated her past and future failures in her college application essay (she went to Harvard) and alludes to life lessons from a janitor grandfather. Lewis invites us to think deeply about failure as a “gift” that is essential to creativity. Megan McArdle earned her M.B.A. but graduated after the dot-com bust, moving back into her parents’ New York City co-op and working part-time in her father’s firm. Eventually, she blogged her way into a journalism career at The Economist and an array of impressive print and online outlets. In “The Up Side of Down” McArdle wants to teach us how to “fail well” by changing how we react to inevitable setbacks. 

Lewis’s voice is so lyrical and engaging that her book, “The Rise,” can be read in one sitting, which is so much the better since its argument is multilayered and needs to be taken whole. The book’s title  exalts the hidden or “outworn, maligned foundation” that can lead to unexpected innovation. The gift of failure, she observes, is akin to the gift of grief. After pain and loss may come a new appreciation of incompleteness and therefore of possibility. Lewis perceives “an ever onward almost” in surrenders, near wins and the perpetually unfinished masterpiece. “Managing the gap between vision and work, which often looks to others like being swallowed by failure, is a lifelong process,” she writes. Failure is ever-­present in the unending drift toward mastery.

McArdle has written a more straightforward if not traditional self-help book. “Since we cannot succeed simply by not failing,” she writes in “The Up Side of Down,” “we should stop spending so much energy trying to avoid failure or engineer it away. Instead, we should embrace it — smartly.” In lieu of seven effective habits, she recommends failing “early and often,” teaching failure in schools, making it easy to recover, shedding biases that keep us from perceiving our mistakes, distinguishing between novice errors and criminal ones, resisting the instinct to blame, and erring on the side of forgiveness. Rooting her advice in American exceptionalism, she remarks: “Failing well can’t be that hard, because America spent several centuries being really good at it. We’re the descendants of failures who fled to these shores from their creditors, their failed farms, their disastrous love affairs. If things didn’t work out in New York, we picked up and moved to North Dakota. Somewhere along the way, we built the biggest, richest country in the world. And, I’m going to argue, we did it mostly because we were willing to risk more, and forgive more easily, than most other countries.” 

One need not have descended from involuntary immigrants, Native Americans, the landless, the unloved, the unforgiven or the Pacific Rim to recognize that if Lewis occasionally overthinks, McArdle’s weakness is blunt generalization. In an autopsy of Enron, she pauses to ask, “Why is it easy to get rich in America, and hard to get rich in Zimbabwe?” The answer is “the culture and rules surrounding risk and failure.” In her best chapter, on the crushing emotional and structural costs of long-term unemployment, she offers, “The best way to survive unemployment is to adopt what you might call the Way of the Shark: Keep moving, or die.”

Lewis argues the opposite. “When we surrender to the fact of death, not the idea of it, we gain license to live more fully, to see life differently,” she writes in tribute to a friend who drowned while saving a child, “to walk down paths of my own choosing, which to some might seem like failure.” For Lewis, failure is the progenitor of new thinking and risk-taking. By contrast, McArdle concludes by reminding readers to “understand failure as the natural consequence of risk and complexity.”

Whether one accepts Lewis’s idea that failure is a gift that keeps on giving or adopts McArdle’s advice that failing well is the best revenge depends, of course, on what you understand by “failure.” Neither book can answer that question for readers, and neither author really tries. Early on, Lewis avers that the word has no stable definition, because as soon as we try to rethink it into a boon or an opportunity, failure is no longer failure and again recedes into shadows or silence.

McArdle, for her part, shrugs: “ ‘Failure’ is sort of a junk drawer of a word. We dump all sorts of meanings into it, and then when something goes wrong, we rummage around and pull one out.” This shared evasion is the only serious failure by either author, because it skirts what keeps so many of us awake at night: that we may fail simply by not succeeding, that failure may become an engulfing identity rather than an ennobling opportunity. Regenerative failure is nice work if you can get it, but what if you can’t?

Another view comes from across the Atlantic: Levin noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class. Those skills weren’t enough on their own to earn students a B.A., Levin knew. But for young people without the benefit of a lot of family resources, without the kind of safety net that their wealthier peers enjoyed, they seemed an indispensable part of making it to graduation day.

Duckworth, a professor at Penn State showed in her early research that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s. But while self-control seemed to be a critical ingredient in attaining basic success, Duckworth came to feel it wasn’t as relevant when it came to outstanding achievement. People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”  They settled on a final list: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity as the best predictors of success in life. Everyone wants their students to succeed, of course — it’s just that many believe that in order to do so, they first need to learn how to fail.

Or as Winston Churchill put it “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” 

Or more optimistically as Robert Kennedy said “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”