Glorious failures... slackness is not an option.

[OneHungLow]

It is reputed that Gene Kranz said “Failure is not an option” and one gets where he was coming from. Failure by anybody in the context of the hostile environment of space, or space flight, would indeed be likely to be total and deadly for the crew, but Krantz also had the wisdom to say “To recognize that the greatest error is not to have tried and failed, but that in trying, we did not give it our best effort”, is equally as true, as was shown in the glorious failure of the Apollo 13 mission where thanks to the best efforts of many good people, total disaster was averted and the outcome, despite the mission failure, was a glorious achievement in its own right.

I guess we can all learn from honest failures, i.e. where despite our best intentions and efforts, we failed, but learned from the experience and thus redoubled any sensible efforts to do better next time around, armed with the new knowledge.

All this rumination and introspection was sparked by a humorous and nostalgia evoking post on my favourite ex-Rhodesian site where the writer talks of his penchant for sun and freedom as a school boy, rather than mathematics that brought him to a numerical low at the time but also clearly caused no great ultimate damage to him or his sense of humour, and I dare say he still learns something, like I do, in ruing past slackness, that ultimately led to better efforts and to some modicum of success later in life.

FAIL

Like the writer of that blog I was also pretty slack in my early years at school, but still managed to pass all subjects, with a minimum of effort until I finally succeeded at scoring an awful 45% in mathematics at the age of 13, a rank failure, and was summoned to see the vice principal, also my mathematics teacher, who said that he was very angry because he knew that I could do a lot better and that I should pull my socks up, and warned he was going to come down on me like a ton of bricks. He was as good as his word and there was no hiding from his wrath, but I improved and eventually took pride in the effort required to finally crawl up into the top percentile in all subjects in the class by dint of effort rather than simply coasting along like the natural born slacker I had been. In one sense it took the shame of failure to be stung into the remedial action that allowed the improvement to occur.

What other failures can other good folks here think of that might have been, glorious or were, in some way ultimately improving in the long run, for them or otherwise.

[OneHungLow]

A shattering silence... all successful then!

I defy the football fans here not to give me one example! Woody?