Learning to Fail

 When my twin brother and I were toddlers, we went to a University sponsored speech therapy program. (My brother learned to speak from me, adding his own errors to mine, and creating the need for speech therapy. Since we were a matched set, they drug me along for the ride.)

This was pre-fertility drug phase, when twins were still rare enough to be interesting.  So while we there, the various experts did a bit of poking and prodding and testing. Apparently we scored insanely high on the IQ tests, but our mother was a bit concerned, and asked for help from the child behavior experts of the day.

“How,” she asked, “can I prepare these kids for failure? I don’t seem to be able to give them anything they can’t do.  How do I teach them about challenges?”

The experts laughed. “Don’t worry about it!” they said. “These kids will master anything they try. They *won’t* fail.”

But we eventually we did fail, of course. 

Like everyone, we ran across subjects and tasks and life events that challenged us to the point of breaking.  Our mother had been justified in her concern; we grew up without any real idea of  how to deal with our failures, or even our less than successful performances.  

And it was worse than that. We were praised not for our efforts, but for being *smart*.  When we failed, or fell short of expectations, it was at best ignored.  We weren’t given extra help, or shown how to do things better, or praised for giving a task our best effort.  If anything was said at all, it was that we hadn’t applied ourselves.   

We learned quickly to avoid things we didn’t KNOW we could excel at.  We learned to do things that made us look smart, and to avoid things that got us criticized (anything that pushed us hard enough that it found the limits of our smartness, or anything that might be seen as mediocre or average). We didn’t learn how to try, even when we might not expect to succeed. We didn’t learn how to “just do our best”. 

And so our intellectual vanity was born; the desire to cultivate the *appearance* of intelligence (rather than the actual application of intelligence) and a need to hide away anything that didn’t look “smart” - for me, ordinary was shameful, and meant I’d fallen short.

It’s a strange set of ideas to find in yourself, but more common than I’d have believed. As I look around, I see any number of brilliant, talented, beautiful and otherwise exceptional people, all struggling with daily life. We were gifted children, now in our thirties, forties and fifties, kids who grew up puzzled about why success didn’t magically happen to us the way we expected, and why the slow reader who sat beside us in high school is now a CEO and we are lucky to keep our checkbooks balanced.

In a world that keeps asking us “Who would want to be normal?”, we’re struggling to accept normal, we’re declaring that it’s ok if we’re ordinary, and we’re stubbornly learning to insist that no, we are not so exceptional that we don’t need guidance, and help. 

Most of all? We’re learning to fail. 

Suggestions on how to fail more successfully are invited : )