Roy Williams, The Wizard of Ads, is holding a contest. It’s a contest for the biggest failure. He is offering $10,000 to the person who has experienced the biggest failure. The prize goes to the person who has taken the biggest risk, invested the most time, passion and capital into a worthy endeavor that, for all intents and purposes, did not succeed.

Why?

Because failure is critical for success.

If we are afraid to fail we will never really succeed; we will never reach beyond our grasp; we will never dream beyond our means. And that which appears impossible will always remain just that, if we are unwilling to fail. Every significant human achievement was once thought impossible until someone, unafraid to fail, pushed the boundaries to make possible the impossible.

Those who won’t risk going too far will never discover how far they can go.

I can’t help but think of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous speech about the merits of daring greatly:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. For far better is it to dare mighty things than to take rank with those timid spirits who know neither victory, nor defeat.”

Yes!

It is in the ‘daring greatly’ that we win, though we may fail.

Henry Ford said, “failure is simply an opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” True failure is actually to fail to try. It has also been said that failure is not defeat, it is merely delay.

If at first you do not succeed…try, try again – for in the trying there is victory, and the victory is in overcoming the fear of failure.

Those who are paralyzed by the fear of failure reveal a deep-seated insecurity – a belief that their value and worth as a person is determined solely by their performance. Our true value and worth goes far deeper than that.

I heard a story of a school that banned Lego. A young girl came home crying because she couldn’t build a structure like one of her classmates. So her mother, in an attempt to save her daughter from disappointment, embarrassment and ‘failure’, lobbied the school to ban Lego. What a travesty! What a missed opportunity for the mother to help her daughter learn perseverance, creativity, humility, courage, empathy, and a plethora of other character qualities.

Failure is not the enemy. An unwillingness to risk, and a need to be comfortable and safe is the enemy. We are actually at our best when we are in the midst of positive anxiety – when we are pushed beyond our limits into that which we are not sure we can succeed. Positive anxiety encourages us to offer our best, to dig deep and give what perhaps we knew not we even had.

We are not at our best when life is too safe. Risk, aka adventure, brings a strength out of us we were unaware we possessed. Too often we will not risk new experiences when we are not confident we can ‘win’, or be successful.

So, I encourage you to step out, step in, step up into that which you may consider ‘risky’, into that which you may not have confidence you can succeed. It is in risking, in taking courage, in daring greatly, that we win – even if we may ‘fail’. Failure is failing to try, and thereby resigning ourselves to a safe, complacent, timid, risk-free existence.

True failure is failing to fail, because you probably have not yet dared greatly – or perhaps great enough.