The Up Side of Down

"Write what you know," says Megan Mcardle, in her 2014 book - The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.  Positive growth in both her professional life, as well as the relationships in her personal life, represent gifts from her previous failures.  Not just a string of bad-luck, she's talking about the deep, soul-crushing periods of misery that follow the stupid mistakes, leading to sleepless nights, anxiety, dread, and regret. 

It's only after these experiences, can the wreckage of previous hopes become the foundation for something bigger and better.  We dislike failure, we're trained to by our parents, teachers, coaches, and friends.  It feels bad, which gets worse when we think others can see it.  That perception is highlighted in the example of public speaking, our collective #1 fear.  So we spend a large portion of our daily lives trying to arrange things to keep failure from happening. 

The assumption is that a failure means we've done something wrong, when the fact is that a failure is often the first result of doing something right; something we've never done before and maybe something that nobody has ever done before.  Focusing on engineering failure from our lives prevents us from embracing it, smartly.  There is a 'technocratic fallacy' in that we can remove the risk from our lives.  Failures are learning opportunities, not catastrophes. 

We can learn to identify mistakes early, so they can be corrected.  Some kinds of mistakes require punishment; others are just the natural errors that we'd expect to occur as the result of doing something we're not very good at yet.  Mistaking one for the other can be disastrous. 

My students will often hide their mistakes, cheat on an exam, or allow someone else to complete their assignments.  These are symptoms of a disastrous mechanism in education that provides no-value to our student's academic and future careers.  Failure is how we learn.  Becoming more risk-averse undermines our ability to cope with life's inevitable setbacks. 

I'll be reading this one twice, and handling out a few copies to my students.  Thank you Megan for sharing your time with us today. 

Megan McArdle is a Washington-based journalist who writes about economics, business, and public policy for Bloomberg View as a full-time blogger on July 15th. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and numerous other outlets.  To find more, please visit her website http://meganmcardle.com/ and follow her on Twitter (@asymmetricinfo).