Failure

How often do you think about failure?

I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. But first, I’m curious about your emotional response to the concept of “failure.”

If you’re at all like me, your initial response isn’t a positive one. I’m a card-carrying double major in Perfectionism and Overachieving. I have been well-conditioned to break out in hives at the mere whisper of failure.

I think I’m in good company. I look around and see people tied up with worry about failing in their responsibilities at work or at home. It’s actually even worse than that. Some dear folks are so afraid of failure that they cannot abide even the appearance that they might possibly fail even in a small area. They put enormous pressure on themselves to appear expert in all things at all times in all places.

Who can live like that? No one, that’s who.

We need to revise the way we think of failure.

I saw something recently (that must have poofed into the ether because I can’t find it now!) that talked about mistakes and failures in art being necessary steps to the learning process. It’s a revolutionary thought.

Dictionaries define failure as the opposite of success, but I wonder if we’d do better to think of failure another way. What if we thought of failures as necessary incremental steps to reach a new height of learning or achievement?

Imagine you decided to learn something new. What if, instead of avoiding failure like the plague, you could acknowledge and even welcome it as it comes, knowing that every failure brought you one step closer to achieving your goal?

What if, when you decided to teach someone a new skill, you decided to make a point to celebrate and showcase the failures as part of the learning journey?

That’s exactly what I’m doing as part of the Beast to Blanket curriculum that we’re so close to finishing. I want to share some of the notes I wrote for the instructors as part of the lesson where the students learn the knit stitch. Keep in mind that the students start right away on a knitted garter stitch square that becomes part of a class blanket project.

Here’s a crucial point: Unless your students already know how to knit, these squares will be a bit of a mess. The first rows especially may look like a dog’s breakfast. I beg you to let them be and to encourage your students to resist the urge to toss out their square and start over. If they persevere with their square, they will get enough practice to see real progress, and it will be incredibly encouraging. Moreover, if you assemble class squares into a group blanket, each student will see their visible record of progress and improvement along with their peers’ and that is a powerfully good thing.

I can’t overemphasize this. One of the ways knitting helps us grow is because it’s a little challenging at first. We don’t usually get it right for a while.

Most of us could benefit from having our expectations adjusted, both for ourselves and others. How different would our internal and external worlds look if we expected ourselves and others to make a bit of a mess of things until we had some practice under our belts? If we left room for others to learn and develop at a reasonable pace rather than instantaneously absorb knowledge or skills? If we accepted that failure was a necessary part of the process of learning something new and embraced it as such?

When you and your students leave room for the messy, uneven, weird rows, and witness them gradually shift toward more uniform, practiced, consistent knitting, you have documented a beautiful acceptance of the natural process of learning. When you have a class blanket that echoes that acceptance in every square, you have a powerful visual celebration of what it is to learn, to create, and to be human.

One of the reasons I’m so passionate about Beast to Blanket is because I’ve seen the way it impacts kids’ character development. I would love for B2B students to walk away with the message that failures and imperfections are a necessary part of life and learning. If they take that message with them into the rest of their lives, they can be more accepting and patient with themselves and others when failure inevitably happens. They might even welcome it once in a while as a sign of progress.

It is hard to see our friends, family, and coworkers stifled by the fear of failure. It’s heartbreaking to see it in a child or young adult. I remember a student who chose to take their beginning work off the needles because they simply couldn’t bear to look at the messiness of their own missteps at the beginning of their learning process. That child had already absorbed the social rule that failure isn’t acceptable. Either she performed perfectly, or she’d destroy all evidence of her attempt.

Creative learning is a golden opportunity to reshape the way we think. Let’s change the expectations so that missteps and glorious messes are friendly landmarks as we progress toward competency. Let’s expect failure alongside success, seeing both as helpful guides rather than opposing forces as we take on the challenge of learning something new. Maybe we’ll even transfer those principles to life outside of creative learning.

How about you? Could you shift your thinking, start something new, and leave some room for failure?

Happy knitting!

Kiersten J