The Benefits of Failure

Have you ever failed at something important? Did you get fired from a job? Did you lose money in an investment scheme? Were you ever divorced? Did you fail a course in school? Things like this happen to everyone. Almost nobody succeeds at everything. The problem is not experiencing failure; it is learning how to deal with it and learn from it. In fact, experiencing failure is one of the most common ways of learning important life lessons. Somehow, however, our society is trying to do away with having to deal with the consequences of failure.

Think about where we are right now. This week, the big failure was the Facebook IPO. The stock came out and went down instead of going up. A large number of people lost money on the trade. Right away, the media is looking to find someone who is at fault for these losses. Congress is going to hold hearings. Rumblings of wrongdoing by the underwriters or the company are everywhere. Nevertheless, through it all almost nobody says that the stock market always carries the risk of stock going down as well as up. Losses (or investment failures) can happen at any time. The fault (if there is one) normally lies with the investor. There is not someone else to blame.

Last week, president Obama spoke repeatedly about the economy and spending levels. He told us how every problem was the fault of George Bush or the Republicans in Congress. In four years, Obama has never accepted anything as his own personal failure. There is always someone else to blame.

Millions of folks borrowed money to buy homes. They took out mortgages that pushed them to the limit. They expected that as their home went up in value, they could borrow more and use the extra funds to pay for the ongoing cost of the mortgage payments. Of course, the prices of the houses went down and there was no way to borrow additional money. Many just failed in making payments and lost the houses through foreclosure. So what do we hear? The lenders who gave these folks billions of dollars were "predatory" lenders. These predatory lenders were so evil that they gave cash to people and only asked them to pay it back. The lenders were so evil that they took the risk that the borrowers would default. So the borrowers got to buy better homes than they otherwise could. The borrowers got to live nicely without being credit worthy. Yet, when the borrowers failed to pay back the money they had been given, the lenders foreclosed. This meant that the borrowers were victims. Imagine! The evil lenders had forced them to take money.

All of these people suffered failures but none of them are accepting the consequences of those failures. Accepting failure and dealing with the result is the best way to grow as a person. Learn that not all IPO's go up. Learn that the president of the United States actually must be responsible for the results of his policies. Learn that when borrowing money, one should consider what one can afford.

When I was little, they used to talk about the "school of hard knocks". In other words, people were supposed to learn about life through their failures. Not anymore. Now we are just supposed to find someone else to blame and sue (or campaign against them.) I still think that graduating from the school of hard knocks does more to teach the realities of life to a person than anything else.