We can’t change the educational system overnight, but we can counteract its discouraging influences and we can change how girls treat failure.
Starting now, we can create a positive environment for failure. This involves simple demonstrations of cheering on girls and letting them know that we’re proud of them when they rebound from failure, when they look for opportunities to help them learn from setbacks, and also when we introduce new ways of teaching and evaluating students.
At VentureLab, where we encourage girls to accept that failure is a part of the process that builds their entrepreneurial skills and develops their tenacity and grit, what’s so exciting in such a setting is that girls:
- Are free to take risks and make mistakes without hurting their grades
- Put into practice their ideas to make something new
- Learn to work with teams on problems that interest them
- Define their own projects
- Take risks knowing that risk-taking is leading them toward better ideas and innovations
- Take on challenges that they’d never have accepted if their efforts were being graded
In entrepreneurial education, the focus is on can, not cannot. In every VentureLab entrepreneurial class or camp, instructors ensure that there will be plenty of frustrating, laughable, “What was I thinking?” failures.
How do we ensure this? Simple: we encourage girls to try new ideas, to test them, to stretch beyond their skill set, and to take a shot at things that no one thinks will work.
The truth is, things usually don't work. That’s the beauty of it. We need only create an environment where failure is anticipated, welcomed, analyzed, and celebrated. We even celebrate so-called epic fails. We’ve been known to shake a can of carbonated water and spray the team, or break out New Year’s Eve noisemakers when such things occur. When I say we celebrate failures, I really mean it.
VentureLab students learn that the mistakes that count the most are the ones that they make on the way to developing ideas. Students learn to take small calculated risks in multiples, testing prototypes that are likely both to fail and to offer valuable information about what works and what doesn’t. Girls learn to fail wisely and repeatedly, avoiding the single catastrophic failure of thoroughly untested ideas.
Frequently, girls who pass through our classes are a bit surprised to find that while their ideas or experiments failed, often repeatedly, in the end it was they who succeeded. Many girls are amazed that a perfect score or top grade isn’t the goal in our course. The goal is learning to think like an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs aren’t discouraged by failures, at least not for long. They learn from failures.
Do you have a failure you want to celebrate? Share it with us in the comments below. Be bold and share your celebration on your social media profiles!
