When the SpaceX Starship exploded over the Atlantic Ocean last week, I immediately thought of Elon Musk’s observation: “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
That attitude appears to stand in sharp contrast to what NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz famously said about the Apollo 13 moon landing: “Failure is not an option.”
The difference, of course, is that Kranz was speaking about one particular and immensely significant mission and Musk was speaking about the process of technological development in general. NASA engineers experienced numerous failures in the build up to the Apollo 13 mission. Kranz was not claiming that failure was never an option; he was insisting that his team must not fail when it mattered most.
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The development of any advanced, highly complex technology necessarily involves plenty of failure along the way. Seen in that light, the Starship explosion (or, in SpaceX terms, “a rapid unscheduled disassembly”) was just part of the process.
According to the company’s statement on social media, the goal is to make progress at every step: “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.”
But what does any of this tell us about the meaning of failure in general? Should we think of failures in our lives as necessary steps in the process of getting better? Is failure actually a good thing?
If you spend any time at all reading testimonies of highly successful people, you will come across a common refrain: the praise of failure. Entrepreneurs, artists, actors, athletes — whoever reaches the summit of their respective field inevitably looks back and attributes their success to the ways they dealt with failure.
Consider a world-class athlete like Simone Biles: “You can only fail if you stop trying and refuse to pick yourself up and try harder.” Or Michael Jordan: “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Presidents have had much to say about failure. John F. Kennedy noted that “only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” And Barack Obama warned not to “let your failures define you.” Instead, “you have to let your failures teach you.”
J.K. Rowling, whose early struggles in her writing career are well documented, observed: “It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.”
And Thomas Edison, whose long list of failures are largely forgotten today, famously claimed: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
What these testimonials have in common is twofold: first, the conviction that the goal of life is success; second, the assumption that overcoming failure is largely a matter of attitude.
It is true that much of life involves setting goals and persevering through setbacks, frustration and adversity. The proper attitude toward failure can help us persevere through difficulties without giving up.
I remember while learning to downhill ski, I noticed that many novice skiers were too cautious. Their goal on each run was not to fall, and that meant they didn’t progress much beyond their initial skill level. So, I would push myself beyond my abilities. “Any run without falling is wasted,” I told myself. Later, when I got to college, I applied the same idea to learning difficult subjects. In every class I would ask at least one question about something I did not understand.
Eventually I became accustomed to looking clumsy or ignorant in front of others. That worked well as a strategy for achieving certain goals. But life is more than achievement.
One of the things failure teaches us is the necessity of accepting limitations, of letting go of some of our desires. There are many things we dream about that simply cannot be achieved. I’ll never comprehend quantum physics. I’ll never be wealthy. I’m not going to live forever, or climb Mt. Everest, or learn to speak 99% of the world’s languages.
When we are young it is easy to think of life as a series of goals to be achieved, but as we get older, we find that our resources are limited. Every pursuit closes the door to other possibilities. And we discover that much of what makes life worthwhile comes to us in moments of quiet significance, moments that have nothing to do with achieving goals. Such moments are found in the presence of beauty, in the enjoyment of friendship, and in the satisfaction of simple, everyday usefulness.
The other morning, I came downstairs to find my wife looking out the kitchen window, watching a family of mourning doves lined up like a row of puffballs on top of a fence, their feathers ruffling in the bitter north wind. They looked ridiculous and — in some way I struggle to describe — holy. All my preoccupation with the things that needed to be done that day dissipated in the face of a profound appreciation of what already is.
There is much to be said for cultivating an attitude of perseverance, of learning from failure, of trying again and again until you succeed. Yet the significance of life extends beyond the goals we might set for it.
So much of life is a gift, and we just need to know how to receive it.
The Ethical Life is a reflection on the ways that ethical thinking influences our actions, emotions and relationships. Richard Kyte is the director of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse.
