Celebration of Failure

If we didn’t learn from failure and just gave up when we failed, no one would be walking. It takes a lot of falling down before one futures out how to stay upright. In those situations, the failures are small and are low pressure. It is not a person trying to take their first steps in a crowded gym as the center of attention. We have often said that school is the junior varsity level of life. You are not yet in the bright lights with a big Friday night crowd. It is Thursday afternoon in front of parents, who mostly are there to cheer for their kids. It is that lower pressure, productive failure that makes us better the next time around. It seems that failure was never anything to fear until a person goes to school. Once we are at school, one learns early on that if you don’t succeed, others may laugh at you or say something mean. After enough of that kind of response, no wonder kids are hesitant to volunteer or to put their whole selves into their work. What if they try their hardest and others don’t appreciate it? Rosamund and Ben Zander encourage people to participate fully by plugging into “‘the electric socket for possibility, the access to the energy of transformation’…by finding the tempo and lean our bodies to the music; dare to let go of the edges of ourselves…participate” (Zander & Zander 121)! 

Ultimately, we are looking for our students to outlearn not only those in the school, but around the world. To do that, they need to become dynamic learners who are willing to fail in order to learn (Staats 228). Celebration of failure appears in almost every discussion or explanation of success. The difference between those who end up being successful seems to revolve around reflection and asking questions. It does take courage of sorts to continue after failure, but sometimes there is no choice. The difference between laterally bouncing from one failure to the next is taking the time to stop and think about what happened and why. Possibly the failure was due to focusing on the wrong strength, the wrong details or ignoring an important detail.

Staats, Bradley R. Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive. Harvard Business Review Press, 2018.

Zander, Rosamund Stone, and Ben Zander. The Art of Possibility. Penguin Books, 2002.

Attributes for Success

 In his book Work Rules!, Lazlo Bock identifies four attributes that Google uses to identify strong candidates. First is general cognitive ability, which works for them because their business involves solving specific difficult problems. The second is leadership, more specifically emergent leadership where a person leads when their skills are needed by the group. That is a quality Arete could use in interviewing future students, or math teachers. The third is "Googleyness," which is a combination of willingness to have fun, be humble and conscientious. This would translate well into Arete almost directly. The fourth attribute is Role-Related Knowledge where they check that the person can actually do the job they are applying for. They believe that anyone who is curious and open to learning will figure out the right answers most of the time. We have found that curiosity may be the most important attribute of successful Arete students, along with leadership, teamwork and work ethic, but that may be related to curiosity. Despite us looking for the same type of people, Bock does not mention most of the qualities we associate with successful students in our program. I wonder if those are implicit Googleyness, or if they feel they can develop those qualities.