Learning from Failure

Mawrters are rightly proud of their achievements. For our students, their academic and personal accomplishments fueled their admission to Bryn Mawr, and their academic drive propels their success across their college career and beyond. Bryn Mawr alums are known for the high standards they bring to their work and workplaces. A commitment to wisdom, truth, and rigor is in the College’s DNA.

Against that backdrop, I was profoundly moved to join a standing-room-only event last semester to reflect on what might appear at first glance to be achievement’s opposite: the experience of failure.

The format of the event was simple yet profound: share a story of failure — personal, academic, creative — with candor and vulnerability. Don’t attempt to burnish it toward a happy ending. Acknowledge the pain or embarrassment that might still linger.

“The Failure Monologues,” as the event was billed, was born of a desire by Associate Professor and Chair of Russian José Vergara, Associate Professor of Geology Selby Hearth, and colleagues in the Dean’s Office and across the College to help others, particularly students, understand that failure is normal, natural, inevitable, and survivable. The aim was also to generate empathy, both for others’ experiences and for moments of failure in oneself.

“Breaking silence about failure, learning to see it as feedback, is essential to experimentation and innovation.”

Each of us has encountered failure and will continue to do so. We will receive a low or lower-than-hoped-for grade. We will try out for varsity and not make the cut. We will forget our lines in a play. The monologues shared that evening brought to mind a particularly resonant failure experience of my own: applying for but failing to land a particular postdoc fellowship multiple times. After three rounds of revision, I prevailed. However, even decades into a career as a funded researcher-scholar, rejection letters continue to sting. What matters about failure is what we learn from it. In the words of an athletics coach who spoke that evening, “Failure is feedback. We can do something with it.”

So much about this initiative inspires me: its grassroots, cross-campus origins; its expansion of empathy and resilience; its overall bravery. José and his colleagues view the monologues as an early step toward a larger vision: an Institute of Failure through which failure might be typologized and examined, more broadly shared, and more deeply understood. As a reflection on the event published in Inside Higher Ed later noted, “Showing students that successful people can be honest and vulnerable is great modeling.”

As we plan for Bryn Mawr’s next chapter, we have the opportunity to educate for the fullness of the human experience, for resilience over a lifetime, for moments of triumph and its opposite. Inherent in the liberal arts is the idea that one should be liberated from constraint, able to risk exploring new disciplines, careers, destinations, and life paths. Breaking silence about failure, learning to see it as feedback, is essential to experimentation and innovation. By talking about failure, we can, as Samuel Beckett famously urged, “fail better.”