What about failure?

I see failure both as a verb and as an adjective. One can be failing, being an activity, and a project can be described as failed. In both of these situations, the failure is a measure of something, most certainly of how well expectations were met. Either way, as a friend described it, the failure is an opinion of how something is.

The feeling of failing, the verb, is to me an indication of that I care or cared about the result. Feeling failure indicates that the activity was important or at least that I expected a better result out of the activity. To then go on and value the feeling of failure, that’s where things get tricky, just as well as important. When we value the feeling or the activity as very negative, or even define ourselves by the action of failing, that’s where things go wrong.

Instead, I propose that a feeling of failure should be just that indicator of that one has higher expectations and that we possibly value the activity or the result a bit higher than we thought. Nothing more and nothing less. That indicator could be a key in making other decisions in the future — it’s now an opportunity to become a better human being instead of anything else.

The description of something as failed, the adjective, is to me just a shortcut for saying that something didn’t live up to the expectations that were put on it. In these cases, a failure is nothing else than something that didn’t go as planned and in a direction that you didn’t want it to go in. In some cases, those lines are needed in order for us to make sense of things and to grow, and in some cases they are unnecessary and we should rethink them.

For example, I had a teacher for my German studies a couple of years ago that wouldn’t correct us when we made mistakes in class. One could say something in a way that the rest couldn’t possibly understand, and when asking if it was correct, the teacher would smile, nod and say “almost.” In this kind of environment, we would’ve needed someone to correct us so that we didn’t fail at making ourselves understood in the foreign language. It also resulted in a shock when we got another teacher who actually put some expectations on us.

My point is that failure is neither good or bad in and out itself as a concept. It’s all about how we use it, and what value we put to the word.