From Rev. William Swing's baccalaureate address at Stanford on June 16th:
Isn't it great to fail when you are 19 years old in front of your parents, peers and professors, and then to discover that life goes on, that the sun comes up again, that there is much more ahead of you? Some people don't conspicuously fail until they are 45 years old, and it devastates them. That's what I want to tell you graduates. Fail early and get it all over with! If you learn to deal with failure, you can raise teenagers, you can abide in intimate relationships, and you can have a worthwhile career. You learn to breathe again when you embrace failure as a part of life, not as the determining moment of life.
A second learning... Isn't it great to spend a lifetime working firsthand on your own passion, rather than working secondhand or thirdhand on somebody else's passion? Whether comedy or faith or youthful idealism or whatever, be an apprentice in something that beckons your heart to pursue with endless fascination... My advice to you: Stay with things that draw you like a magnet. Trust your DNA. Pay attention to your daydreams.
Fail early and get it over with. I love that advice, even though I've heard it before. Quite a few of the MBA students I work with haven't yet failed conspicuously, and I think unfamiliarity with failure tends to result in one of two equally problematic outcomes: We either give ourselves too much credit and become dangerously overconfident, or we don't give ourselves enough credit and become dangerously risk-averse. And in both cases, we miss out on the opportunity to learn that failure isn't fatal (and can be both liberating and educational.)
Pay attention to your daydreams. More great advice--and related to Swing's first point. If we're pursuing our own vision and not merely working to fulfill someone else's, we're probably taking some big risks. Those risks are essential to our ultimate success, but by definition they also make failure more likely. But is failure the worst possible outcome? Not necessarily. At least if we fail, we can close that chapter, move on and pursue another path to fulfillment. It may be worse to succeed just enough to keep us tied up but not enough to truly realize our vision. Clearly, at times it makes sense to put our daydreams on hold and minimize the risk of failure, but at other times that's simply a recipe for insuring that we never really succeed.
Photo by L.A. Cicero. © Stanford University. All Rights Reserved.
