Failure is Magic
an opinion article written by Izzy Reidy
When I was growing up, my mother always used to tell me “you need to learn things now, because you can’t learn anything past the age of 25.” While this was a grim outlook on my future, it was one that I took more or less as truth until I began teaching. One of the most powerful skills children have is their tremendous capacity to fail. They fail every day at almost everything they try, until slowly, over the course of weeks, months, and years, they begin to grasp the skills we as adults forget we had ever had to learn in the first place.
The power of this truth has been humbling and empowering to me. Very often we are told a story that certain skills are innate- music, math, art. You have them or you don’t. From what I have observed, the reality goes more like this- you do them, or you don’t.
Once we are accustomed to a certain degree of competence, depending on our disposition, failure becomes less and less bearable. We expect ourselves to have a baseline of skill at something we have barely tried, and throw up our hands saying “I’m just not a musician!” or “I can’t draw!” And it makes sense! We’ve all been told if we can’t do something well by the time we are adults, we shouldn’t be doing it all. We are repeatedly told there is no value to a skill that cannot be displayed and/or monetized, and both of those things require a baseline of competence.
That is a waste. There is so much joy and satisfaction to be had from the act of learning, and from letting go of results. I see it all the time with my students- the first time a new skill really clicks, the pride of doing something which seemed impossible, the experience of playing with other people for the first time. There is frustration and demoralization, absolutely, but it doesn’t usually come with the same baggage we carry as adults. There is so much freedom in that.
It has been a rough couple of years. As we move into 2022, I’m going to give myself a new year’s resolution I know I can stick to: I want to fail. And not in the start-up culture-y “fail on the path to success” way. I want to fail and be satisfied with failure. I want to accept the skills I have right now, and enjoy what I am capable of at this moment.