Failure is not an option...

When I was about nine or ten my dad brought back a t-shirt from a business trip in Florida. It is a quote from Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director on Apollo 13. While it is exactly what I would want to hear from a flight director if I was an astronaut, I think as a child I would have been better served by the words of Edison "I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don't work."

While "failure is not an option" works reasonably well as a stance for the parents of a bright (if sometimes lazy) child living in a town where teachers were told not to use red pens, everyone had to be given valentines, birthday party invitations and end of the year trophies, at some point we will all fail. Success isn't about never failing, it is about learning to fail well. This has been the toughest lesson of law school. One of the secrets of the law, which is actually painfully obvious, is that you are going to lose half of the time, and if you define winning as getting exactly what you client wants well then that number is considerably lower. So law school is the excruciating experience of failing a lot, of breaking you down to very small painful parts and building you back up in a way that makes failure less personal so you can learn from losing, so that even the worst sort of day isn't really a failure.

This isn't compatible with "failure is not an option" and it has isolated me. I have created an infallible facade in front of a very human girl. When I am less than perfect there is no one to share that with because it doesn't fit with who I was created to be. There is nothing to success if it wasn't fought for and in exposing our wounds we are allowed to learn from them rather than letting them fester in the dark.