I’ve been a little focused on failure as the path to success lately. I think it is because my daughter is graduating from college and my son is graduating from high school, both in the same year, and both are sharply focused on what to do next. They are hyper-focused on the need to succeed, and I am spending more and more time reassuring them that there is more than one path to success, more than one definition of success, more than one way to measure success.

Allow me to meander a bit. We’ll focus on writing in a moment.

My daughter is a talented singer. She attended Ithaca College for vocal performance. That college is no joke for vocalists. Throughout high school, she experienced measurable success, though she tried to achieve more. As a college senior, though, she had a tough time with graduate school auditions and didn’t gain admission to the schools she wanted – she saw this as failure. My son is an actor. He attends a performing arts high school, he has been in more plays and musicals -both amateur and professional- than will fit on a resume. He was invited to audition for some of the top college conservatory programs on the east coast, only to be turned down time after time. He, like his sister, saw this as failure. My heart broke for both of them, like any mother’s would. They work so hard. They are so well-trained and educated. What happened? There is no simple answer. But instead of looking backward, the only way to look is ahead. What comes next? A plan to succeed. How to turn those downturns into something valuable.

Both kids now have separate paths ahead. My daughter is focused on a year of training and working with vocal students, looking into vocal health and perhaps a conducting MFA in another year. My son accepted an offer from a great college in New York not for theatre, but for film. Once he shifted his view, a whole new picture emerged. Actors are in movies, after all.

So on to writing…

I’ve written plenty of documentation that misses the mark. I have to go back to it and rethink, rework the process until it hits. I read the work of Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who articulated how important it is to feel insecure, to lose, to get things wrong. (I am far oversimplifying this but the gist is – you must fail.)

As people, to succeed, we have to embrace failure in order to succeed. Tech giant Jack Ma spoke at the World Economic Forum in 2018 about his failure when he applied for a job at KFC. 24 people applied for positions, 23 people were hired. He was not one. He applied to Harvard 10 times. He was not accepted. 10 times! Talk about really wanting something!  Failure hurts, indeed, but we learn from it. It’s normal and maybe we should see it as a little less detrimental and harmful if we can start to view it as part of our growth. (I still doubt that I would apply ten times, but…)

I recently read H. Jon Benjamin’s “Failure is an Option” while on a road trip. Seriously funny stuff, that book. Part memoir, part joke, the whole book had me in stitches. If the guy who blends Archer and Bob’s Burgers and landed in a big pot of wealthy can’t talk to you about failing, who else can? And he can write, too! As a writer, I respect that. I brought his thinking to my writing, and to my workplace. He may not be drafting technical manuals, but the point is still the same. You can reinvent text, yourself, your path, and your work. Failure IS an option. Just don’t flog yourself over it. Don’t make it a habit, unless you are a comedian, and then if you are, write a book about it and cash in on the whole life experience.

Henry Ford is thought to have said “failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.” And I’ve read that it took Dyson vacuums 5,127 prototypes in order to arrive at that amazing, ultra-successful 5,128^th model that we are willing to pay a handsome fee for – all to have a great experience.

Workplaces that penalize failure wind up with low-talent, low-energy responsibility-shirkers. In technical writing, and in any kind of writing, it is taking a risk, being willing to innovate and develop new methods, new approaches, and new techniques that blazes a new path to truly dynamic customer experiences.

Our work is integral to our lives. Our successes are integral to our work. What we do defines who we are, whether that is our job, our home life, our sports or our pastimes. When there is opportunity in decision-making, there is risk and there is reward (unless there isn’t).

So, dear writers, break out the pen, not the safe pencil with the eraser, and make yourself uncomfortable. Mess it up. Then fix it. Then learn from it. Fail…to succeed.