Too often, girls are taught that it's the absence of failure that equals success.
But often failure is a necessary stepping stone to achieving success. It's part of the process of learning, developing, clarifying, quantifying and adjusting on the way to achieving a goal.
Success isn't about perfection. It's about determining what's wrong and correcting that. Moving from the pressure of perfection to the freedom from fear involves taking a look at this underlying need to be perfect.
The cure for perfectionism is simple enough: it’s imperfection.
It’s getting it wrong. It’s learning how to fail, to value and to appreciate failure as something that can teach you. It is learning how each stage of a project yields actionable information…that each step can enlighten or, at worst, eliminate a dead-end course of action. In order to accept imperfection, girls need the support and understanding of family, teachers and community.
Entrepreneurial education infuses failure with positive meaning. It offers strategies for changing how girls see failure. It gives girls what I call “practice at failure.” When you teach girls that failure is part of a process, they learn that everyone fails. It’s how you deal with failure that makes all the difference.
At VentureLab, experiences with failure are built into our curriculum, where students work collaboratively and undergo a process of discovery that extends beyond the project they are working on. We encourage them to be curious and to try different approaches to solve a given problem or create a product. Very often, they learn by virtue of having to reasses their approach, ask peers for insight, identify areas for improvement, and refine their solution. We establish a safe environment in which to examine the role of failure in real time and with supportive groups of peers, girls learn to redefine failure. For many girls, a VentureLab entrepreneurial class is the first time that they have seen failure as a valuable, vital part of learning. They discover that there’s something transformative about learning, that they have the ability to create and grow an enterprise and have the tools to carry an idea forward. Most importantly, they learn that the route to success is not linear.
The power of girls experiencing entrepreneurship education is that girls not only come to see failures as steps in learning, but that they also apply this thinking to any challenge in life—academics, relationships, family, sports, service, and career!
I'd love to hear about how you've coped with failure, and how you've encouraged or worked with the girls in your life to understand setbacks of their own, and to move ahead from them. Share your stories and recommendations in the comments below! And stay tuned for my next post, where I'll look at how we can counteract the discouraging influences that afflict girls and young women, especially in our educational system.
