Fringe Benefits of Failure

Can I just say that J.K. Rowling is the woman?!  What an incredible talk!  I found myself legitimately moved by this talk, and there were a few moments that especially stuck out to me.  I thought the most incredible quote was the following: 

“And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.”

Wow. Just, wow.  I feel like this theme has been coming up a lot in our discussions, especially in the “seminars” that Brady and Shaun gave at our retreat a few weeks ago.  It’s an interesting dichotomy that having empathy, having the ability to identify with others and to feel compassion, at once makes you extremely vulnerable but also a stronger, better human being.  It seems like the general consensus of the educated on this issue is that nothing of value comes without sacrifice; you have to be willing to go out on a limb, you have to be fully invested (and thus vulnerable, because you’re in a position to lose everything) in order to achieve big things and to make big gains.  One of Shaun’s mottos so far this year has been “go big or don’t go at all.”  If you’re going to fail, at least fail spectacularly and learn something from it.  If your failures are small, that means you didn’t invest very much in the project to begin with.  Fail or succeed, but don’t get stuck somewhere in the middle.  And this brings me to another one of my favorite quotes from the talk which was:  

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.”

I think this is where we can really learn something and apply it to our council.  We need to learn to objectively analyze our failures.  What went wrong?  What did we do that was unnecessary or “inessential”?  How can we remove these things from our process and try again?  These are the questions we need to ask every time something doesn’t work out so we are better prepared to succeed the next time.